Building fault tolerance into Oracle Reports

Question

I have a report that I am working on in Developer 2000 that loads images from a filepath stored within my database. This works great but the report bombs out if the image does not actually exist or the filepath is wrong.
While the obvious solution is to make sure the files are present, it would be nice to trap an error message for this situation as it occured and to simply carry on as if nothing had happened.
Is this a possibility ?? ... I'm new to this and have a learned a lot quickly, if it where not for time constraints I'd be picking through the weak Oracle supplied documentation, with that in mind a good book recomendation would be wonderful

Answer 1

This seems to work for text files. It should work for bitmaps as well:
1) create a function and set it to char, read from file
2) add the code
function cf_rowFormula return Char is
in_file TEXT_IO.FILE_TYPE;
file_nm varchar2(30) := 'c:\myfile.txt';
begin
in_file := TEXT_IO.FOPEN(file_nm, 'r');
text_io.fclose (in_file);
return file_nm;
exception
when others then
text_io.fclose (in_file);
return 'c:\empty.txt';
end;
If the program doesn't find myfile, it will load empty. I'm not positive but it has to load something for it not to get an error. Hope this helps.
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