At 12:49 PM -0500 12/22/01, David MacAlpine wrote: >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.
I suspect that what's really going on is that MS Explorer is *reassigning* the type and creator code to the file after it's downloaded, per it's configuration for that particular MIME type, and that Netscape/Mozilla are not configured to assign that type and creator to the MIME type that the data is identified as... So, check what MIME type you are identifying your data as, when you allow them to download it from the database, and make sure that MIME type is set up to have the type and creator you want in Netscape, or Internet Config if Netscape is set up to use that. -Jeff Lowrey
