Documents stored in SQL table

Question

I have a legacy FoxPro application which stores documents in an SQL table in a field with the image datatype. FoxPro accesses the image datatype as a "General" field which can be used to store various files. I have a FoxPro control which interfaces with the General field for modifying/viewing the document that was stored. I need to migrate this control to .NET and make it easy for users to view/modify documents of various types.

Does anyone have any suggestions on some ways to go about this or know of things that I'll need to consider for the migration to .NET? I'm pretty sure that I'll need to migrate the field to either a varbinary(max) or FileStream data type.

Answer 1

Are you sure you want to continue holding the documents in the database? What's good for Foxpro isn't always good for .Net

You're probably going to have to use Foxpro to read the general fields, and either upload them or save them locally for another app to upload.

Have a look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/467854/can-i-extract-a-file-from-a-foxpro-general-field for good info on general fields and http://blogs.msdn.com/manisblog/archive/2007/10/21/filestream-data-type-sql-server-2008.aspx for a filestream vs varbinary comparison