Conversion of string to BLOB format

Question

Hi,
Scenario is proxy to JDBC:
I have a requirement where my PFD file name is maintained in one ABAP R3 table and I need to convert the PDF file name to BLOB format.
Is there any function module available in R3 for converting to BLOB data type. or java mapping is required in graphical mappping for this conversion.
My pdf file name is:
SHELL_INC_123456789012_851000000005290_DE_04_2008.pdf
Thnx
Chirag

Answer 1

Hi Chirag,
I don't think there is any FM in ABAP is written for this purpose. you should need to write an UDF. Also my concern is that "where is the PDF file located"? If the answer is "on a file system accessible to the Oracle database" Then you can use directory objects and the DBMS_LOB package. It would look something like this:
as SYS user do:
-- assume the PDF files are in /data/documents filesystem directory
create or replace directory pdfdir as '/data/documents';
grant read on directory pdfdir to <USER>;
as USER do:
create table mydocs (id integer primary key, doc blob);
declare
bf bfile;
b blob;
src_offset integer := 1;
dest_offset integer := 1;
begin
' insert a new blob and return it to local variable
insert into mydocs values(1, empty_blob()) returning doc into b;
' open the bfile for file "summary.pdf"
bf := bfilename('PDFDIR', 'summary.pdf');
dbms_lob.loadBlobFromFile(b, bf, dbms_lob.lobmaxsize, dest_offset, src_offset);
' done
commit;
end;
I assumed that you are working with 2 different machines, one client, one server.
If you are working on a single machine, there may be a simple bug in the code.
try adding the line
dbms_lob.open(bf, dbms_lob.file_readonly);
between the calls to bfilename() and loadBlobFromFile()
Also if you want to do this using java then please have a look in this link.
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/idshelp/v111/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.jccids.doc/com.ibm.db2.luw.apdv.java.doc/doc/cjvjdlbv.html
Hopefully this will help you.
Regards
Aashish Sinha