Member Avatar for mleonard

I'm having trouble understanding how to update a PDF file in a FileTable using SqlFileStream and am hoping someone here can help. I think I just need an overview of how this is accomplished.

In my forms application I'm retrieving the PDF with READ access and displaying it in a PDF control through/using MemoryStream.

After adding some annotations to the PDF file I want to save/update the PDF file, and this is where I get lost. Since the PDF file has been opened with READ access I'm guessing I'd have to open another stream with WRITE access but I don't know how this is done. Basically, I'd like to overwrite an existing PDF file in the database.

Thank you for any help/guidance,
Matt

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Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

You don't need to use SqlFileStream to store a PDF (or any binary file) into a database. See the example here

Member Avatar for Matt_3

Thanks for the information. That's good to know.

Does this approach make updating an existing file in the database easier?

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

I tried this in my SQL Management console query window and it worked.

UPDATE PDFStore
   SET Contents = (SELECT  * FROM OPENROWSET(BULK 'D:\test.pdf', SINGLE_BLOB) SOMEALIAS)
WHERE FileName = 'D:\test.pdf'
Member Avatar for Matt_3

I see in your example that you're working from the file system.

I'm still wrapping my arms around saving/updating files in a database, so pardon my ignorance, but does this assume that the file has first been saved to the file system (from the database)?

Or is your example with FileTables in mind?

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

I don't understand what you mean by FileTables. I know what a file is, and what a table is, but not a FileTable. Yes, my example requires the PDF to be in a file, however, it may be possible to create that file in memory rather than to disk. I'm not particularly interested in researching this so feel free, however, in the absence of a memory-based file you could always use the %TEMP% folder for such an operation.

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