BLOBs and ASP: Store ok. How to View/Download?

Dear all,

I finally managed to upload a binary file to a BLOB field in my Oracle 8i table (through Oracle OLE-db). In the same table I also store size and content type of the file.

What I'm trying to do now is to build an ASP page listing all the documents in this table and put beside each document two buttons: View and Download.

Clicking the View button should open a pop-up window and display the document in the web page (if the MIME type is known), while clicking the Download button should open the standard dialog box (even if the MIME type is known).

I know you can read the blob and save it to a file on the web server, but it is not clear to me when the file should be deleted. How do I know, for example, that the download is over?

I've found examples of images sent from a BLOB field to the browser, but I'm not dealing with JPEGs of GIFs: doc, xls, pdf, ppt, etc. Is it possible to read the binary data of a BLOB and send it to the browser without saving to file?

And how can I tell the browser to ignore the MIME type and open the download dialog?

TIA for your patience and help.

Alessandro Received on Mon Feb 11 2002 - 08:59:46 CST