Using CLOBs in oracle Report Builder

Question

I want to select all the data in a CLOB column using SQL Navigator by just doing
select entry_note
from chartentries;
just as you say in your example by it just gives me back a result of (ORACLOB).
If I do
select to_char(entry_note)
from chartentries;
I get this error.
If I do
select dbms_lob.substr(entry_note,4000,1)
from chartentries
I get this (there’s more up to 32000 characters in a clob) and these weird squares which I think are CR (carriage returns) or LF (line feeds). I don’t want to see those characters and I would like to retrieve the entire CLOB in one swoop without doing data manipulations of substringing.
Using the same data in Oracle Report Builder, I want to select all the data in a CLOB column into a field in a Paper report layout but I keep getting errors, ora-6502, and I've found out that I am restricted to 4000 characters and in Report 9i it looks like the largest field you can have is 4000 characters. My CLOB information can be up to 32000 characters long or longer and I do not want to substring out 4000 characters at a time into separate fields. In Crystal reports there is no problem just selecting the clob in a simple query and it is there in one shot. I would have thought by now that Oracle would have changed its development tools to be able to handle Clobs simply without any manipulation. Does anyone know how to do this in Report builder? I just have a simple query:
select entry_datetime,
to_char(replace((entry_note),chr(13))) as entry_note
from chartentries
where patient_id = 49741
Another thing I want to do, is call this Oracle report from a PL/SQL block passing several parameters to the report and also call a Crystal report from a PL/SQL block passing several parameters to the report. Does anyone know what the commands are?

Answer 1

What I had to do is create a query using query builder. This works fine; it's when trying to add the column to an existing query is where the data inconstancy error occurs. One thing you have to keep in mind is it will only work using the query builder in conjunction with the report wizard; I am not sure why. To incorporate the comments into an existing frame you will have to cut the frame created by the wizards and copy it into the existing frame. Otherwise the column name will not show in the source list of the property Inspector.
Good Luck