Re: [Flamerobin-devel] BLOB-Editor as Dialog - Patch 001

[Lester C. <le...@ls...>]

Michael Hieke wrote:
> Andreas Maier wrote:
> 
>>> In my experience, people generally do follow the rules and use 
>>> sub_type zero for binary data and sub_type one for text. Sometimes 
>>> they use something else (like -1 or 10 or whatever) to mark special
>>> kind of binary data. IMHO, we should follow the simple rule and do
>>> what is normally expected. If some users use Firebird in some way
>>> that is not "standard", it's their problem. Therefore:
>>>   
>> I have to admit that i usesd blob-subtypes for a long time wrong. (I
>> used binary to store text...:-( ) I didn't care about it. But
>> anyway, you're right and i agree.
> 
> I must say that I don't agree.  Many people will have databases with 
> BLOB data that doesn't follow the rules, partly because they didn't know 
> better at the time, partly because for Firebird 1 or 1.5 stuff like 
> UTF-8 support wasn't even available.
> 
> It's very wrong IMHO to assume that BLOB content will always be in the 
> connection charset, or even that text BLOBs will always have sub type 1.

I have to agree that what is stored IN a blob may not be as well 
designed as we might like. So any blob editor should default to OFF. 
However it would be useful if we could actually tidy things up via 
Flamerobin? So while it will complicate things, a method for changing 
the character set of a blob field would be useful? And being able to 
select a character set to use as a default in the editor to override NONE?
Going on from that, an intelligent processing of data in the blob may 
well be able to identify a subset of binary data, and some of the 
internal blob types in order to offer alternative views of the data?

Personally I'd like to get everything to UTF8 anyway - but I'm still 
waiting for PHP6 for that :(

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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