Sending LOB Data To VB Client

Background: I'm developing a traditional (fat) client - server application. The client is written in VB and uses RougeWave as middleware to access the database server (we support Oracle, Sybase and SQL Server). The database server consists of hundreds of stored procedures. In the Oracle implementation, the procedures return their result sets to the VB client via cursor variables. This has worked fine for the "standard" column datatypes (char, number, date). Now, I need to return LOB data to the client. The LOB data can be scanned images, Microsoft Word or HTML documents. In our SQL Server implementation, we use textptr to establish a pointer and readtext to return the data to the client.

I would like to do the following: TYPE CV_TYP IS REF CURSOR; P_CV1 CV_TYP; OPEN P_CV1 FOR DBMS_LOB.READ (L_BLOB, ...); However, this does not compile. Do I need to issue DBMS_LOB.READ inside a loop and fetch small blocks from the BLOB column and insert them into a temporary work table. Then open the cursor variable to select the contents from the work table.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own Received on Tue Mar 16 1999 - 13:34:26 CST