Hi
There are, naturally, a number of ways to do this. The simplest is by far the worst, and that is to have a table with a GENERAL field in it and use the APPEND GENERAL command
to put the .pdf into it. Please DO NOT use this approach or I may be lynched for even saying the words (bit like saying the name Voldemort in a Harry Potter book).
This approach works, but suffers from TWO gotchas. a) the file containing the .pdf is a memo field, and it is difficult to retrieve the orginal file and b) it is restricted
to 2GB which will very quickly be eaten up, maybe as little as a few hundred thousand documents could hit the mark.
Way no. 2 is a TINY bit better, that is to use a Binary Memo field, and use REPLACE MyField with FILETOSTR("MyFile.PDF"). This works, and so long as you know the file type, you can
get the original file back easily. ** BUT ** the 2GB maximum file size still bites pretty quickly. Please DO NOT use this approach either.
No. 3 is the path (sic) to take. Don't store your files in the actual table, put the file names in there instead (finding some way to leave off the drive reference).
Then move the original file into a directory structure, instead of the database. This enables your data to grow almost without limits and, with a little imagination, span drives if needed.
Even if you only coded the files by the date or month they were received, they would remain manageable (so you might have a structure that used a new folder for each month, or week, or day or year).
Try to keep the files to no more that a thousand in each folder (or Windows is slow to manage them), the likely absolute max is probably going to be 64,000 in each folder.
I hope that helps a little.
Let us know how you get on.
Regards
Griff
Keep [Smile]ing
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I'm trying to cut down on the use of shrieks (exclamation marks), I'm told they are not good for you.