C# Programming
05-20-2009, 12:13 AM
Yeah..The title says most of it. One of our IBM Mainframe guys came to me earlier asking for advice and I didn't know what to tell him. There is a column on one of their tables that is a "true" BLOB. It can contain an image, a doc, a txt, an mpg.....and we have a process in place that can receive the BLOB, convert it from EBCDIC to ASCII, then send it to a C# app that can introspect the file type and launch it in the Citrix app appropriate to that type.
However, THIS request was to attempt to bypass the EBCDIC to ASCII conversion("too expensive") and to send the file(let's say it is a jpg file) directly to MS Paint(very contrived..This is not an MS Paint specific question) and have MS Paint be able to receive the image in EBCDIC rather than ASCII.
I was telling him that there's no way that our C# process can receive an EBCDIC Blob and bypass a conversion to ASCII because apps developed for x86 processors don't deterministically access EBCDIC encoded data because they almost exclusively expect ASCII. I don't think that there's anything that our process can do in this case because all it was essentially doing was introspecting the ASCII encoded byte stream and shooting the file off to the appropriate application.
Is this going to come down to application specific data interpretation
[i.e. The app receiving has to be able to access an EBCDIC stream], or is there something
that our app can do to intervene?
Does anybody have anything that I could tell him that is more authoritative than the http://www.barakasoft.com/script/Forums/Images/smiley_OMG.gifhttp://www.barakasoft.com/script/Forums/Images/smiley_sigh.gif http://www.barakasoft.com/script/Forums/Images/smiley_confused.gif http://www.barakasoft.com/script/Forums/Images/smiley_WTF.gif http://www.barakasoft.com/script/Forums/Images/smiley_squeamish.gif look and a "can't be done" that was the only thing I had to give him?
"I need build Skynet. Plz send code"
modified on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 3:46 PM
However, THIS request was to attempt to bypass the EBCDIC to ASCII conversion("too expensive") and to send the file(let's say it is a jpg file) directly to MS Paint(very contrived..This is not an MS Paint specific question) and have MS Paint be able to receive the image in EBCDIC rather than ASCII.
I was telling him that there's no way that our C# process can receive an EBCDIC Blob and bypass a conversion to ASCII because apps developed for x86 processors don't deterministically access EBCDIC encoded data because they almost exclusively expect ASCII. I don't think that there's anything that our process can do in this case because all it was essentially doing was introspecting the ASCII encoded byte stream and shooting the file off to the appropriate application.
Is this going to come down to application specific data interpretation
[i.e. The app receiving has to be able to access an EBCDIC stream], or is there something
that our app can do to intervene?
Does anybody have anything that I could tell him that is more authoritative than the http://www.barakasoft.com/script/Forums/Images/smiley_OMG.gifhttp://www.barakasoft.com/script/Forums/Images/smiley_sigh.gif http://www.barakasoft.com/script/Forums/Images/smiley_confused.gif http://www.barakasoft.com/script/Forums/Images/smiley_WTF.gif http://www.barakasoft.com/script/Forums/Images/smiley_squeamish.gif look and a "can't be done" that was the only thing I had to give him?
"I need build Skynet. Plz send code"
modified on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 3:46 PM