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Re: Extended Characters

From: Mladen Gogala <mladen_at_wangtrading.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 15:49:30 -0400
Message-ID: <20040413194930.GA8125@mladen.wangtrading.com>

On 04/13/2004 01:22:01 PM, Deanna Schneider wrote:

> The recommended hack is to change all extended characters to their html
> entities before insert - which works fine if you're using the data only on
> webpages. Not such a good approach if you want it for other stuff - like
> downloadable spreadsheets and such.
>
> Can you think of anything that could be done?

Uhmmmph, well, yes, I can think of something. The database can be converted to UTF-8 (AL32UTF8) which works fine with the database, but I don't know whether the Cold ConFusion can actually handle UTF-8 characters. If your database is 9.2, your DBA will be able to do that with an "ALTER DATABASE" command, which will take forever to complete, but if it is an oracle8i, the full export/import will be needed. As for the downloadable spreadsheets, The simplest things are always the best: an anonymous ftp server serving the spreadsheets would be a very simple thing to set. You are a developer, (Jared spells this word incorrectly), so you should know that you shouldn't serve presentation, you should serve the data and let the users use their own presentation methods to present the data. In other words, lusers should be able to connect to the database using ODBC, get everything into excel spreadsheet and use their own creativity to format the data. If you want to serve ready-made spreadsheets containing the data, there is software called Spreadsheet::WriteExcel on the place called CPAN and it's not too pricey, you might be able to afford the license fee. Combined with the software called DBI from the same location, it can help you to create excel spreadsheets without even having Excel on the box. You can send $128 to Jared and he'll gladly sell you the software. He even wrote a book about it.

-- 
Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA
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Received on Tue Apr 13 2004 - 15:41:44 CDT

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