Exporting Blobs from OpenBase

This example transport copies images (one per row) stored in the OpenBase TalentPhoto table, into individual image files. Each image file name contains the primary key.

For this example, the TalentPhoto table comes from the Movies application and database example included with WebObjects.

In this example, the database server used is OpenBase, but Sybase and Oracle and any database that supports binary large objects (blobs) will work just as well.

This transport is interesting in that it doesn't just create a single output file, but many files: one image file for each row in the table. The basic transport is simple in that it transports the Talent primary key to a text file. Nine lines of custom script extract the photos into individual files, named by their primary key.

Photo Transport

The transport file used in this example is photo.transport, and this is a report of its contents:

Transport.
  photo.transport

Folder.
  /Schema/work2000

Source.
  EOF entity: TalentPhoto
  Model path: /Schema/EOFTransports/OpenBase.eomodeld
  Attributes:
    photo     photo     TEXT  20
    talentId  talentId  INT    2

Destination.
  File: /Schema/EOFTransports/photos.data
  End of record: \n
  Columns:
    talentId  string  0

Expressions.
  talentId = talentId

Row Preprocessing.

if photo != NULL {
   declare N string = "/tmp/photo-" +
      convert(string,talentId) + ".data"
   print "CREATING FILE ", N
   declare F TText
   redirect F to file N
   print to F photo
   reset F
   remove F, N
}

End.