Greetings,
I work in primarily mac based biology lab. Some of the molecular biology
software we use stores the data in binary form. I've set up a web based
database using mySQL and perl for macosx to organize some of our data. One
problem I've run into are these darn binary data files. I would like the
users to be able to upload the files into the database and then be able to
retrieve them later. Currently users can upload the files, but when they
download them they lack the creator and type information. Thus they refuse
to open in the original application. I've found a couple of workarounds,
but I'm not to happy whith them.
1. Have everyone use ms explorer for the mac. Not sure why, but ms
explorer seems to keep the creator/type associated with the file, wherease
netscape and mozilla do not. (Is msexplorer binhexing the data on the
fly???) The majority of the lab prefers netscape.
2. Have the users binhex the file before storing it in the database. Not
likely most users would be baffled.
3. Use Convert:BinHex module on the server to add creator/type information
as well as binhexing the data. This seems to work fine, but there are
several programs we use and it would be hard to guess which program the
binary data is in. (I tried using
$type=$query->UploadInfo($filename)->{'Content-Type'} with no success)
Does anyone have any clever ideas? Is there a way to specify to tell the
browser(netscape/mozilla) to binhex the data before uploading?
Thanks in advance,
David MacAlpine
