9 interMedia Relational Interface Reference

Application developers, who created multimedia applications without using the Oracle interMedia ("interMedia") object types to store and manage media data in relational tables, and who do not want to migrate their existing multimedia applications to use interMedia objects, can use the interMedia relational interface for managing their media data. The interMedia relational interface consists of a set of methods for:

• Extracting information directly from their media data as either an XML string or as XML and individual attributes

• Processing and copying image data

• Loading media data into Oracle Database

• Exporting media data from Oracle Database into operating system files

The primary benefit of using the interMedia relational interface is to let application developers take advantage of interMedia functions with only minimal changes to their applications, and all without having to change their schemas to the interMedia objects to store their data.

The Oracle interMedia relational interface consists of a set of static methods (see Static Methods for the Relational Interface) for the interMedia objects: ORDAudio, ORDDoc, ORDImage, and ORDVideo. Because these are static methods, no object is instantiated. Data is passed by method arguments rather than by object attributes.

Methods related to the source of the media have ctx (RAW) as the first argument. Before calling any of these methods for the first time, the client should allocate the ctx structure and initialize it to NULL.

ORDAudio, ORDDoc, and ORDVideo methods related to media parsing have ctx (RAW) as the first argument. Before calling any of these methods for the first time, the client should allocate the ctx structure and initialize it to NULL.