Reading BLOBs

My first approach to the BLOB-handling code took a bit longer than expected due to my aging brain. Please understand that the code I'm publishing today is incomplete and will change in the future. I hope that it helps you in understanding what it takes to read BLOB data through the SQL Compact OLE DB provider.

There are two important changes to the code since last post:

1. Columns are indexed by their ordinal.
   
2. Columns are bound using a two-pass approach - On the first pass the non-BLOB columns are bound using the same accessor handle. The second pass binds the BLOB columns allocating an accessor handle for each column.

The bulk of the code that reads the BLOB into memory is on the new CRowset::GetValue method. Note how the column accessor handle is used to retrieve the ISequentialStream pointer and how it is read into a CString. You have to consume all the data immediately because you cannot keep that stream object alive very long, especially if you want to read or write to another BLOB.

Most of the complexity you see on the code (the difference between binding and column indexes) stems from the fact that columns are being moved around in order to make binding simpler. When life was simpler and there were no BLOBs, there was a direct relation between column and binding entries and there was no need to map between the two. Now that we are moving binding entries around, we must make sure that a mapping exists between both arrays (see the GetBindingIndex method).

Next post will handle writing data to the BLOB.

Sample files: EditRow3.zip, oledbcli2.zip