Details
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Type:
Bug
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Status:
Resolved
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Priority:
Major
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Resolution: Invalid
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Affects Version/s: None
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Fix Version/s: None
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Component/s: None
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Labels:None
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Environment:PostgreSQL 8.4
Description
The type system introduced by Doctrine makes impossible to store binary data in PostgreSQL databases that use Unicode. The `text` type is mapped to `TEXT`, but any trial to place some binary data there ends up with a database error, like this:
SQLSTATE[22021]: Character not in repertoire: 7 ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x9c
This is a critical limitation, because Doctrine cannot be used now in projects that for any reasons have to use PostgreSQL, and their databases must store binary data. Even if it cannot be fixed right now, it should be clearly pointed out in the documentation in "Known vendor issues".
A possible solution for this problem is creating an equivalent of 'text' field, called 'binary' or something like that. It must be a simple type that is mapped to the simplest, but large type available in the database engine without any form of data structure validation. For PostgreSQL, this could be 'blob', but other database engines can use different types.
This is an old post but just in case somebody else finds it. There is no need to do any of the above to store binary data in Postgres. I had the same situation and was easily solved by compressing file, base64 encoding it, and finally serializing it.
public static function prepareFileforDatabase($file)
{ $compressor = new \Zend_Filter_Compress_Gz(); $file = $compressor->compress($file); $file = base64_encode($file); return serialize($file); }We use Zend and you may be able to get away with not compressing if you wanted to avoid the extra overhead on your server. To undo it is exactly the opposite.
public static function prepareFileforPHP($file)
{ $compressor = new \Zend_Filter_Compress_Gz(); $file = unserialize($file); $file = base64_decode($file); return $compressor->decompress($file); }Sorry for the code coming out in all one line, but you get the idea.