DB2 v7 fp10.

Our users are facing problem where they are unable to display certain kind of data through MS Access. The data type in question is BINRAY and it's very inconsistent. Data is displayed correctly for some BINRAY fileds but not for all. Could this be a problem with ODBC driver? Or something else need to be setup?

Any comment will be great!!!

dollar

Did you mean BINARY?

What specifically are you expecting / seeing?

Yes, it should be read BINARY. What we are seeing are varitely of special characters or simply a small box.

dollar

Sounds like Access may be trying to translate the binary to characters instead of treating it as binary data?

Okay, so is there any setting we can change on either end?

dollar

It's going to be an MS-Access setting if it exists, but I haven't been able to track it down on my system.

I've had similar end-user comprehension problems

If the application translates to the Ascii matrix, it will
treat the each 8 bit (1 byte) group as a Character
in the codeset - often resulting in special characters.

One solution is to cast to char(hex()) fields at the backend,
yielding numbers 0 through F, which most endusers will not
disagree with and which MSÁccess will surely translate correct.

HTH

Kristain,
When you say backend do you mean Access or DB2? Mainly ours is DB2 database.I would really appreciate if you can point me to some document explaining your solution in detail.

Thanks.

dollar

I'm suggesting you add a column in the DB2
database table. Next to your binary column.
Then update that column using the Hex() values
of the original column , and let the MSAccess users
use the new column instead

If you do this you'll probably want some triggers to keep the new column in sync on INSERTs and UPDATEs.

Access stinks, there should be a way to change the display of Binary data to be more like Db2's, ie. display it in hex... interpreting it as characters is goofy.

Hi Jonathan

I know - but you figth with the weapons at hand.

Cheers

Thank you guys!!! You are great.

dollar