Re: Text support in Forms

In <1993Mar2.190256.18656_at_sol.UVic.CA> jroberts_at_sanjuan (John Roberts) writes:

>Forgive me if this is a repeat, but I think my original post was lost.
 

>I need to be able to handle large amounts of text, often multiple fields
>per record, with as much "word processing" functionality as possible.
>The application is to be deployed on Unix/dumb term, Mac, and DOS/Windows,
>using Forms 3, DBMS 6.
 

>I see a few options:
 

>1. Use a LONG field, and give up text searching and multiple fields.
>2. Use multiple CHAR fields, and deal with coordination. Better than
> LONG, but still does not do word wrap, cut/paste etc.
>3. Use SQL*TextRetrieval - not available on Mac.
>4. Use an interface to a WP package - the users are varied and have no
> single standard.
 

>So far, #2 looks like the only workable one. Does anybody have
>experience/suggestions that could help me?

Actually if your willing to do the work, there is a hybrid solution between #1 and #2. You can declare char variables upto 32K in PL Sql. You could use a long field, but during database operations copy the field to a PL Sql char variable (which you can use substr and other nice PL Sql fuctions on) and store the multiple char fields. You would have to rebuild the long field when you query the data. By storing the char fields in a different table, this would solve all of the problems except for text searching and could even give simplistic text search capabilites. If you don't see a way to do it post a reply and I'll see if I can dig up some code.

                                Craig Received on Thu Mar 04 1993 - 20:42:45 CET