Re: [ppa-dev] What to do about bytea bug...

[Jehan-Guillaume (i. de R. <io...@fr...>]

On 24/01/2013 16:45, Robert Treat wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 8:48 AM, Jehan-Guillaume (ioguix) de
> Rorthais <io...@fr...> wrote:
>> On 24/01/2013 14:32, Karl O. Pinc wrote:
>>> On 01/23/2013 11:03:50 PM, Robert Treat wrote:
>>>> I spoke with ioguix a few days ago on irc about releasing a
>>>> new version of PPA, and that I had hoped to take another
>>>> crack at solving the bytea problem.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> Thoughts?
>>> 
>>> I'm going to have to pay attention to make sense, but this is 
>>> what's at the top of my head.
>>> 
>>> What makes bytea so special that it's corrupted?
>>> 
>>> Why do we not display bytea as hex, and have it be edited as
>>> hex? (Why would hex cause corruption?)  Pg shows bytea as hex,
>>> for a reason: there's no way to tell what's encoded as bytea.
>> 
>> If there's no HTML/js escaping messing needed with hex format,
>> I'm 100% ok with this solution. That was my feeling as expressed
>> in my previous mail : « Did you try with both bytea format ? »
>> 
> 
> To answer Jehan's question, I did try both bytea formats, and tried
> on multiple versions of Postgres, but was unable to get it to
> work. Please don't let that stop you from trying again though,
> it's certainly possible I was doing it wrong.
> 
>>> If bytea is to be displayed as something other than hex that
>>> should happen in javascript on the client.
>> 
>> Mh, you're talking about showing the content of the binary, ie.
>> an image ? We're far from this consideration imo.
>> 
> 
> right. we only want to show the hex output, not show actual
> images. (also, consider the use case of things like hex passcodes
> or similar; bytea isn't always an image).
> 
> I think where the issue comes up is that when you submit the form, 
> there is some escaping that occurs for http purposes. PHP is
> supposed to give you the tools to deal with that, and postgres is
> also supposed to give you some tools for that, just that I couldn't
> figure out a working combo. The form piece is significant; ISTR
> that I was able to get a script to do the select, escape, unescape,
> and update (where I just put back the same value) to work
> successfully, it was when adding in the step of displaying via form
> and then submitting that it falls apart.

Could you give us this script ? It would be a good scenario/starting
point to work on this issue with you.

> And not to be pessimistic, but I was very surprised I could find
> no example PHP application that did this. Plenty of example for
> reading a a file from disk and inserting it, and plenty for pulling
> bytea and displaying it, but no for retrieving from db and the
> updating from a form. :-\
> 
> 
> Robert Treat play: xzilla.net work: omniti.com