01.24.2002

PostgreSQL/JDBC tip of the day: With the 7.1.x drivers, loading and saving binary data is an unintuitive process.  Just keep these things in mind: All access to OID columns must be in transactions.  Even reads... No BYTEA columns for you! You might need to use the native Statement and ResultSet if you are using pooling software that acts as a proxy to the underlying implementation.  Use getBytes/setBytes And this will supposedly all change with the 7.2 drivers.  Boo!

Formatted Object (FO) tip of the day: My client wanted their generated PDF documents to have the "Page x of y" footer.  Getting the current page number is trivial (<fo:page-number />), but getting the page count isn't so obvious.  First, create a block where you know it will be the very last block in the document.  Give it a unique id: <fo:block id="endofdoc"></fo:block> Then, use this element to get the page count: <fo:page-number-citation ref-id="endofdoc"/> This has been tested with the Apache FOP renderer.