[Zope-dev] More on DCOracle and BLOB handling

[Cheuk Cheng]

First I appreciated for those who responded to my original posting.  So far
I still haven't found a solution but yet learned a few new things and would
like to share with everyone.  For those who didn't read my previous message,
my problem was trying to use a Zope external method and doing a blob
insertion into Oracle (8.0.5 on Solaris). I'm using the DCOracle compiled
with VC6 on a NT platform.  With DCOracle I could create the connection and
query the database without any problem for any kind of datatypes including
blob.  When trying to perform a insertion, it keeps reporting a "invalid hex
string" error.  

Now here's what I found so far.  When I was searching for a solution for my
problem, I came across the mxODBC driver.  I created a standalone Python
script that makes use of mxODBC driver and successfully inserted data blobs
of any size (>10M).  So I thought that I could copy the mxODBC package from
python\lib\ODBC to Zope (under Shared\ODBC\) and access it via an external
method.  Then I found a naming conflict with the Zope odbc driver.  I went
ahead and renamed the odbc.pyd to win32odbc.pyd.  Next I tried to import the
mxODBC driver in my external method as:

import Shared.ODBC
from Shared.ODBC import Windows  

dbc =
Shared.ODBC.Windows.Connect('user','password','dsn',clear_auto_commit=1)

When the external method is executed, I got an error message "Error
Type:AttributeError      ErrorValue: Connect".  If I successfully imported
the module, shouldn't I have access to the connection method?  Anyone has
any idea on what I've done wrong?  

Also I would like to find out if there's anyone successfully using DCOracle
with Oracle 8.0.5 (on any platform) to insert blob.  Please comment.

Thanks
-Cheuk