Duncan Mein's Blog

A while ago I came across an issue exporting the contents of a BLOB to a flat file on my file system. My processing was to upload a .csv file into the wwv_flows_files table, and write a file back to my Oracle directory using the UTL_FILE api. Upon inspecting the file produced, a newline character was inserted after every line. To cut a long story short, a colleague of mine came up with a workaround that involved parsing the newley produced file, removing any spurious lines and creating a new file minus the blank lines. As you can imagine, for large files, this added a fair amount of time to the Upload process. There is light at the end of the tunnel however. This article was sent to me by another colleague. At the end there is a solution to the problem. Cheers Kris " Oracle 10g includes extra open modes (rb, wr, ab) to signify byte mode operation. The "wb" open mode can be used along with the PUT_RAW procedure to prevent extra newline characters being added on a Wind

The strangest thing happened the other day whilst performing an application import within Oracle XE. The import was successful but running the application however was less so. Some of my pages contained a lot of JavaScript in the HTML Header section of the Page Attributes. On some of these pages, the import appeared to add a carriage return to one of the lines and thus breaking my script. The knock on effect was that my application ground to a rather unimpressive halt. Without having the time to investigate why, I decided that it would be better to store all my JavaScript in a . js file on the server and write a reference to it on the pages where the scripts were needed. Once you have created your . js file (I store in a sub directory if the /i/ path) on the server, you can reference these files by adding the following to the HTML Header of your page: Storing your long JavaScript externally to your application also makes debugging a bit easier as well.

For those web developers out there using FireFox ,you have to install the Firebug extension. It lets you explore the DoM in far more detail than ever before. Simply download and install the extension, restart FireFox and hit F12. You can then see all your HTML source, JavaScript, CSS etc. It also has a cool debugging tool for JavaScript that lets you step through line at a time. I can't tell you how much time this extension has saved me this year. Get it, install it and give it a whirl. You wont be disappointed I promise. Microsoft have released their Developer Toolbar for Internet Explorer which goes some way to providing the same functionality for the Microsoft die hards out there but its a million miles away from our friends over at Mozilla.

Well, finally made it into work on the 3rd January and it's always tough after the holidays. However its not long to wait until the 13th January when I will be spending a week in Meribel. Hopefully we will all return in one piece this year as well. My girlfriend had quite a nasty accident last year in Austria which resulted in a large laceration to her leg and required several rather large stitches. I digress however and just wanted to offer some advice for those who are struggling with the "back to work" bug doing the rounds. A colleague of mine told me yesterday that his girlfriend always has to have a holiday to look forward to. I thought this was a brilliant way to beat off those New Year Blues and so why not start planning your Easter getaway. Surly the prospect of another holiday is the best way to cure the disappointment of one just ending......... Just a thought.