Media Objects, how I loathe thee

[morglum666]

Hi All,

I'm struggling with to find either a:

* Answer that works
* Proper solution

To my dilemma of extracting media object information from F1755 which is what used to be known as CSMS. Basically the main application (P17500) does "Case Management". The ugly part is that the default memo field is a media object and I would like to display this information on blackberries (9700, other modern varients). So my actual ideal path is something like:

Create a custom application over this table.
Pull the relevant "case" details from the database.
Pull the media object data and display it in a regular text box so the blackbery users can see it.
In another text box, allow users to type in information and call the media object again and update it.

I primary referenced this web site but it doesn't cover converting the media object back into text, if that is even possible.

http://jde.mywwsoft.com/index_files/mediaobjectsupport.htm

Has anyone pulled this off? Any advice? Oracle support suggested manipulating the BLOB directly but I don't think that was great advice.

Cheers

Malcolm

 

[Wendell]

Hi Malcolm,

I share your pain and in my frustration found a tool sometime back. Media Objects are after all BLOBs and the DBBlobEditor works and though I didn't use it for my project I will for my next project if I can justify the cost.

< http://www.withdata.com/order.htm >

Regards,

Wendell

 

[Scott Beebe]

Here is another paper on my site that might help. Did you see this one?
http://jde.mywwsoft.com/index_files/accessmediaobject.htm

 

[morglum666]

Thanks to you both. I will look into both solutions.

I like the C++ one more but I don't have any knowledge of C++. It would be another programmer who would actually implement and maintain the solution although I would be teaching them the basics of JDE programming.

Thanks again - this is a great forum

Malcolm

 

[Alex_Pastuhov]

This is through the WEB interface, right?

Our One Attachment Manager software may potentially be of use in this scenario, but with an AS/400 backend, you would need to build a separate Wintel server to do OAM calls, so it may not particularly practical...

 

[morglum666]

As a whole I am somewhat discouraged. Perhaps this is easier to work with in a newer tools release (We are on 8.96) but when I read through the oracle documentation it appears that only the obsolete windows mobile client is supported. No dice for blackberries.

I tried "Quick links" functionality as well to see if I can bypass the menu traversal problem I'm having with the menu pull down, but that doesn't seem to work either. Someone else set that up so perhaps its a configuration error.

I'm still going to try Scotts solution but i'm now thinking that we might be better to delay until 8.98 and take a stab at it again.

Malcolm

 

[Larry_Jones]

Malcolm,

The only way I can think of doing this within the JDE toolset has timing issues. Basically my thought is to use a UBE to convert the MO Text into plain text and store the converted text in a F55 table your app would access for the blackberry display.

This timing issue is that you'd either have to do this in batch overnight or on a on-demand basis. I do something of the reverse on a on-demand basis now. User's here sometimes need a exploded Bill of Material on a PO line as a text attachment. I gave them a button on P4310 to punch which submits a custom UBE that explodes a BOM (with associated MO text), building a Text array that is attached to the originating PO Line. This typically takes < 5 seconds in our environment - and so it works for us. Environments vary though so your mileage may be different

 

[cscdans]

Hello Malcom,
we are on 8.98, but I think even on 8.96 there are some c-functions existing for reading and wirting text from/to F00165. Just try use GetAllGerencicTextName and AddGenericTextName. But there are other MO-APIs, see http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B31038_01/jded/acrobat/e1_tools896tbf-b_0406.pdf from p. 162 on.
In the knowlege garden (better my oracle support) you can find jdeAPIs896.chm (or now jdeAPIs898.chm) conting useful information, not jsut only about C-APIs, even on System Functions, Events etc.

Best regards,
Carsten

 

[morglum666]

Thanks for the assistance first of all and for contributing your knowledge.

I think the way we are going to end up is probably a combination of Larry's idea or Scott's API (Which is really a variation of the standard API oracle provides).

I tried a few more things to see if I could get any mobile friendly tech to work including parameterized queries - and that worked alright. I could go directly to a form after logging in and that bypassed any menu issues. No clicking find, however

So now I move along to the tricky part. At my last employer, we used standard BSFN's and called them using java interop for address creation, etc, invoices, commissions, customer master. If we use a modified C++ function for media object retrieval, is that still accessible using the interoperability methods like xml, java again? Logically I would think it would work but I don't know if anyone else has experience with that and they would like to comment.

I find it semi-infuriating that Oracle ended up with this route with media objects since I rarely see anyone use it for anything other than text. But that's just a little gripe

I talked again with oracle support with a broader query asking if there was any supported interop methods for BLOBS in our current tools release all the way up to 8.9.8.X, and they said no.

We're talking a lot of mobile lately and I'm cringing a little bit not because the technology isn't exciting, or valid, or has the potential to save us money but that I don't see any real sort of Enterpriseone mobile strategy (Outside of CRM).

Malcolm