Thread: blob inserted from linux not readable by MS Access

Dear all,

I have just made a small shell script that will parse
incoming e-mail to a specific address and put some
selected parts of them into a Postgres table.
These e-mails have also binary attachments (pictures)
that I have to store together with the other e-mail
data.

I was succesfully able to perform the above tasks and
now my db gets populated by e-mails.

The problem that I'm having is that this db is
supposed to be viewed using MS Access through an
ODBC connection to the linux server (this part is
working) and I cannot avoid using Access even if I
would ;-)

The images I upload on the linux server are not
understandable by Access and the opposite, images I
upload with Access are not in any reasonable format.

It seems that Access translates them in some obscure
internal (OLE?) format.

Actually I tried detaching on the linux db server a
9894 bytes jpeg I inserted into a record from Windows
using Access and it was 551096 bytes big! but still
Access could open it and show it correctly.

So my problem is how to have Access understands the
pictures I've loaded in the db, since I'm not a db
expert I do not know how to write an Access
application that could understand them (and I actually
not like to waste time doing it).

Is there something I missed in the setup or that I
could do to improve compatibility?

Can I maybe define a default viewer for Access to use
when I double click on the OLE attachment?

I'm confused...


The blob fields are declared as type lo.
The server is PostgreSQL 7.2.2 on SuSE 8.1 (the
version on SuSE's cd) , the client Windows 2000
Professional with MS Access 2000 and PgAdminII v1.4.2

Thanks in advance,

Massimo

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Max <cbm128@yahoo.com> writes:

> The images I upload on the linux server are not
> understandable by Access and the opposite, images I
> upload with Access are not in any reasonable format.
>
> It seems that Access translates them in some obscure
> internal (OLE?) format.

I ran into this recently and didn't find any way around it.  Access
doesn't have any ability to discern a file's type from its contents,
so it has to wrap a BLOB in an OLE object so it can remember what it
is.   My solution was to convince my boss to migrate away (eventually)
from the Access interface to HTML.  :)

The problem might be soluble with enough programming on the Windows
side (you might write a VB clone of the Access app, for example) but I
don't have, or want, enough Windows expertise to say for sure.

-Doug