Re: FN-FORUM: SQL Server and Word Documents

date posted 1st April 2004 22:30

Hi John,

As far as I know you could save Word documents like this but I'm not sure
that I would or not. It's a personal 'thing' of mine but when I've had this
sort of problem to deal with I've stored pointers to the word documents in
the database, and the document files in a directory. I've also stored the
name and extension in separate fields, so that if I want to change the
document type I can do reasonably easily and do a bulk conversion of the
documents in the directory.

If you do 'on the fly' searching then you can get some results by treating
the blob field as a big string, but I've found the only effective way to do
this is to index the word file using a piece of VB middleware when the
record is created. The middleware opens the word document using COM,
processes it using the Word object interface and creates a list of words in
the file (rules for selection of words in the middleware or in the
database). The words are then stored in a lookup table linking back to the
word document, and keyword searches can then be done on the list of words.
You can do some suprisingly sophisticated stuff like this.

Hope this helps.

Joe



From: "John Kyle" [EMAIL REMOVED]
To: [EMAIL REMOVED]
>
> I have been searching google for a bit and have not got very far with this
> one. I would like to store Word documents in SQL Server, I know I will
have
> to use the varbinary field (BLOB equivalent). But I would also like to be
> able to search the word douments directly in the database.