I am new to Paradox, having used FoxPro and Access. By setting the properties of a BLOB field in Paradox 11, I can see whether the field is blank or contains a value. How can I find out what the value actually is? There does not appear to be a method of displaying it.

1 Press F9.
2 Right-click a BLOB field, and click Properties.
3 In the BLOB options area, enable the Complete display check box.

I have tried the F9, Right click on a BLOB field, selecting properties and checking the complete display but all the field shows is:

<Binary value>

I assume this indicates that there is a value held in the field as some of them display wording that indicates the field is empty. I need to see what the actual value is.

This is hard since a binary value can actually be anything including an application (*.exe file), Multimedia file or other. From the database, can you tell what types of objects are supposed to be saved in the field such as a graphic or other?

There is a *.MB file which holds the actual datatable which might be helpful to you if you can look at it with a hexadecimal viewer. Could it be that the file application that can open the file does not or exist on the computer from which you are trying to view the database?

The various BLOB formats (graphic, binary, and so-on) really don't say anything about what kind of data can be stored in them. As far as the file-format is concerned, they're all simply "storage space." The preview-area, which is what you see in an ordinary table-view of the field, is really an entirely separate area altogether.

My frank recommendation is that BLOB fields really aren't a very good choice for storing large blocks of data. Not only is the 2-gigabyte architectural limit "rather limiting" these days, but the overall storage format is rather precarious. A filesystem does the job much better. A database is a great place to store a file-name, if you catch my drift...

I really don't know what type of data I am looking for in the BLOB field. At work we are using an building construction cost application that looks like a series of linked spreadsheets but is actually a Paradox database. The built-in report formats (which are produced via the built in Crystal Report Writer) do not support our requirements so we pull the data from the Paradox tables into MS Access and print from there. In doing this we have discovered that the sequence the items are displayed in the Paradox tables is not necessarily the sequence in which they are stored and I believe the diplay order is held in one of the BLOB fields. The Australian authors of the application are not forthcoming on this and only responded that they did not think we would be able to view the contents of the BLOB fields with any software likely to be available to us. I purchased the full Corel Wordperfect 11 suite in the hope that I would be able to track this display sequence down but no luck so far. Haven't given up though.

It is more likely that the display order uses a secondary index in one or more of the datatables. You should be able to find that by using infostructure and checking out the secondary index tabs.