In message <eXkeYn2aFHA.2900@T...>, P James 
<p.james@N...> writes
>
>Can anyone simply tell me whether they are doing this - using XML data
>types, or CLOBS, for fields in a database?  Judging by the lackof response,
>maybe nobody is doing this successfully with ADO (not ADO.NET) and VB6.
>
>Thanks,
>PJ
>

The reason you seem to be getting little in the way of response is that 
you don't seem to want to help yourself despite the advice I and others 
have offered.

The very fact you are accessing an Oracle database says you must have an 
Oracle driver installed and therefore ADO should have no trouble in 
accessing all the fields. If you are using a third party driver (ie: NOT 
Microsoft's or Oracle's) then I would suggest switching. After all, they 
are free to download.

Again ... Using ADO 2.6 or 2.7 ...

Write a little test program to access your Oracle database and the 
appropriate table. Then using the ADO Fields collection examine the Type 
property of the XML and CLOB fields you are struggling to access. You 
can then check the ADO DataTypeEnum values to work out how ADO is 
interpreting these two fields (ie: adVarChar, adBinary etc etc).

If you are not sure what the integer return values correspond to then 
post the results here and I will tell you (any good book on ADO will 
have a list of these values in the back). Then depending on how ADO is 
identifying these fields, depends on how you can access them.

Even though my list is a little out of date and as already suggested, I 
would suggest the XML field is being returned as one of the numerous 
string types which would mean you can access the field directly; and the 
CLOB is probably going to behave like an SQL Server BLOB object and be 
handled as a binary data type, in which case you may need to use the ADO 
GetChunk method to retrieve the field contents.

You ONLY really learn by doing SO ... NOW go and play for a while and if 
need be, post the results back here.

Kind Regards,

-- 
Andrew D. Newbould                  E-Mail:  newsgroups@N...

ZAD Software Systems                Web   :  www.zadsoft.com