Exporting binary fields

Hi,

Since recently it is possible to store bitmaps etc in the binary field type. Is there a way to export them again from the database?

No, I don't think there is any general way to handle this. It will obviously depend on what the binary field contains (image, video, sound....) and the file format being used to export to. In most cases there will be no natural way to handle the binary data in the exported file (e.g in a SDF). In one or two special cases there might be something that would make sense. If there are any particular scenarios you think it would be useful to handle then please let us know, but in general I would think that it would be more sense to leave it to the user to create some custom export mechanism direct from the DB that covers the specific individual case.

Tim

Hi Tim,

Since IJC for the time being does not support plotting of f.e. dose-response curves, the only way to get them in is as images. It would be great for many medicinal chemists if one could compose lists of compounds and then export structures and corresponding dose-response curves in f.e. Excel (or JChem4XL) format. That's the sort of application I have in mind.

 

Hi,

yes, that would be one such special case where it would make sense. Unfortunately it can't really be done with the current export mechanism, as it is the raw data from the database that is exported, not the formattted data. This means that the export would only see the data as raw bytes, and does not know that in this particular case the bytes can be used to generate an image of a particular format.

We are planning on adding the ability to export formatted data directly from the grid view, in which case this may then be possible as the appropriate renderer will have already been chosen to convert the bytes to an image. However this functionality does not yet exist.

Tim