Re: ACS - viewing CLOB data

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 6:16 PM, Craig Richards <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I built the original data into the IFS as an xml document, and was able to
verify the content by viewing it in a browser which rendered the Japanese
and Greek characters properly.
I then read the data from the IFS file and wrote it to the CLOB in one
program, and ran another program to read it from the CLOB back to another
IFS file, which I was able to verify looked ok again in the browser. In the
absence of being able to view the data in the CLOB directly, I figured if I
could write it to the CLOB then read it back out ok, there was a fighting
chance the data in the CLOB was correct.

There's no clear definition for "view directly" in this context. Any
viewer at all is going to have to do some kind of conversion at some
level. The real test is whether that program you wrote (for reading
out the CLOB) is representative of how this data will be used "in real
life". In other words, if the production application using this data
is written in the same programming language and accessing the CLOB in
the same way that your test program did, then your "fighting chance"
is very strong indeed, and you probably can't do any better than that.

Ultimately, it's that production application which *defines* what's
correct. So the closer you can replicate that, the better. The best
would be to use the production application itself on your test data.

John Y.