Creating a linked table in NAV with a blob

JoshRing

Hi there,

In a table in a second database outside of NAV we store external documents (pdf, images, textfiles etc) in a varbinary field. We would like to be able to send an e-mail to an employee - from NAV - that can pick up the right external documents and attach them to that mail.

I thought a new NAV table, linked to a view on that second databasetable, would do the trick. But it seems a NAV 'blob' field is not quite the same as a varbinary in SQL Server. When I run the new table, NAV raises an error on incompatibility between the blobfield in nav and the bigint (?) field in SQL Server. In the blobfield properties, I've set compression to No, but that doesn't seem to help.

Perhaps someone can shine a light on this? Is it even possible to 'map' a blobfield to a varbinary in a view? Or what would be the best (hence: fastest) way to get these varbinaries in NAV?

Best regards,

Josh

Slawek_Guzek

Hi,

NAV keeps BLOBs in an image type column.

Convert the column in your other table-to-be-linked to image type, or create a simple view based on it, casting varbinary(max) column to the image type, and link the NAV table to the view.

Slawek

Juhl

You could also get the data by sql using .NET, put it into a stream and use it from there. Then you don't need to worry about data types and mapping.

JoshRing

Thanks Slawek & Juhl! I will try your approaches.

Josh

Slawek_Guzek

Hi,

NAV keeps BLOBs in an image type column.

Convert the column in your other table-to-be-linked to image type, or create a simple view based on it, casting varbinary(max) column to the image type, and link the NAV table to the view.

Slawek

Juhl

You could also get the data by sql using .NET, put it into a stream and use it from there. Then you don't need to worry about data types and mapping.

JoshRing

Thanks Slawek & Juhl! I will try your approaches.

Josh