LONG RAW read/write

Hello everybody,
  I need urgent help about my problem.Here it is:  We are using Oracle 7.3 to support some of our projects. In a project, we have to store and retrieve data of LONG RAW type. We have a table for this data with the following definition:

  BLOB (id NUMBER, context LONG RAW)

There are two different ways in which we need to read/write data of this type:
1. Using the following stored procedures/functions within PL/SQL block:

  PutBlob  (context     IN BLOB.context%TYPE,status  OUT INTEGER)
            RETURN INTEGER;
  Getblob   (blobid   IN INTEGER,context OUT BLOB.context%TYPE,
            status OUT INTEGER);

Question: How do we assign a value to the 'context' parameter before invoking the functions? We know it is possible using a string of hexadecimal or binary characters, but we would like to avoid any kind of conversion of the actual data to such string. Can anybody provide us with some examples of how to call stored procedures having LONG RAW parameters?

2.Using OCI functions in C++.
We also need to write/read data into the table using OCI functions from C++ directly. How can we insert/read LONG RAW data elements using OCI functions from C/C++? We found some examples in the ORACLE on-line documentation that we have, but they don't work properly.

We would apreciate if anybody can help us on these problems. Thanks in advance,

Yasemin Ugur Received on Tue Nov 17 1998 - 03:15:56 CST