1. HCM Data Loader
  2. How You Load Images, Attachments, and Large Strings

How You Load Images, Attachments, and Large Strings

You can load both Character Large Objects (CLOB) and Binary Large Objects (BLOB) using HCM Data Loader. However, the way in which you provide data for these objects is unique to these attributes.

Instead of supplying the data directly in the data (.dat) file, you supply it in a separate file. You supply the name of this file as the value of the relevant attribute in the data file.

This example shows a data file for the Document Attachment component. The File attribute references a text attachment file in each MERGE line.

METADATA|DocumentAttachment|DocumentType|File|PersonNumber|...
MERGE|DocumentAttachment|Drivers License|file01.txt|23901|...
MERGE|DocumentAttachment|Drivers License|file02.txt|64235|...

This approach is used because data for these data types can be very large. Also, data to be loaded directly rather than by attachment may need new-line characters, making it complex to include in the business-object data file.

How to Supply CLOB and BLOB Files

To load data into a CLOB attribute, you supply the data in a separate file. You place the file in a ClobFiles folder in the same .zip file as the business-object data file. Similarly, to load data or upload an attachment to a BLOB attribute, you supply the data or file to attach in a BlobFiles folder. The data type of the attribute that's used to load a large object or attachment determines which folder to use.

The business-object documentation specifies the data types of all attributes. For example, the File attribute of the Document Attachment component has the BLOB data type. Therefore, you place referenced files in the BlobFiles folder, as shown in this figure.
The .zip file for Documents of Record contains a BlobFiles folder, which contains three text files in this example. The text files are file01.txt, file02.txt, and file03.txt.

File names in the ClobFiles and BlobFiles folders can include UTF-8 single-byte characters. For example, file names can include the alphanumeric characters a through z, A through Z, and 0 through 9, underscore (_), hyphen (-) and parentheses ( ). Most file-name extensions are supported, though CLOB data is usually supplied in text (.txt) files.