RE: IDS : Passing BLOBs to SPL functions using VB6, OLEDB and ADO

With reference to my old topic : http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.databases.informix/browse_frm/thread/87a658a9de53d8af/52c5c74965618d05?q=oledb+blob&rnum=11#52c5c74965618d05 The gist of the problem is, it's not possible to pass blobs to UDRs via the OLEDB provider. It's a bug, although I've had some difficulty persuading people not to log it as a "feature request". (when something doesn't function as stated in the documentation then that's a bug right?!) As a workaround I've changed the input argument of the UDR to "references byte" from "blob" and in the body of the function I'm casting to blob. The only real limitation that I can see is that this means I'm limited to passing in a maximum of 2^31 bytes but at present that won't cause me any issues. Another possible workaround (as suggested by tech. support) would be to write the blob to a temporary file, use filetoblob to load it then delete the temporary file but I find my solution a little neater ;-) I encountered the problem when using the OLEDB provider but some quick tests suggest that ODBC probably suffers too. I've found the problem exists in client SDK versions 2.81 and 2.90. Hopefully this post will save others from the hours of googling that I've endured....

I forgot to mention the IDS version is 9.40TC2 Rich