Oracle Tips by Burleson

Storing Files in APEX

Uploading files is very easy in Oracle Application Express (APEX)  if the plan is to store them in the provided table WWV_FLOW_FILES.  It may not seem so at first, but after just a few samples you will know exactly how to do it.  The goal of this section is to provide a couple examples of the more common uses for uploading files. Those uses are to store images for later display in a web page and storing documents either for downloading or for display into a browser such as a PDF file.  These two examples will yield the tools necessary to provide the same functionality in a very short time.

Explaining WWV_FLOW_FILES

Loading scripts and other files into the repository have been mentioned throughout this book.  The files uploaded are put into a table in the FLOWS_FILES schema named wwv_flow_file_objects$.  This table name is indicated in the dads.conf file with the parameter PlsqlDocumentTablename.  How it looks in the dads.conf file is shown here:

PlsqlDocumentTablename   wwv_flow_file_objects$

APEX then provides a view to this table named WWV_FLOW_FILES.  Running the following script in a SQL Command window will reveal the files currently loaded into the repository.

select
   id, flow_id, name,
   filename, title, mime_type,
   doc_size, dad_charset, created_by,
   created_on, updated_by, updated_on,
   last_updated, content_type, language,
   description, file_type, file_charset
from
   wwv_flow_files;

The only column missing from the WWV_FLOW_FILES view in the query above is the BLOB_CONTENT column.  This is because the SQL Command window will give an inconsistent data type error when querying a column of BLOB data type.

The above book excerpt is from:

Easy HTML-DB Oracle Application Express

Create Dynamic Web Pages with OAE

ISBN 0-9761573-1-4   

Michael Cunningham & Kent Crotty

http://www.rampant-books.com/book_2005_2_html_db.htm