error when using table with column of type bytea

[tomkralidis]

(from mapserver-users)

In WFS server mode, when invoking a GetFeature, accessing a PostGIS table containing a column of type bytea, an empty result set is returned. When dropping the offending type bytea column, the same GetFeature response returns (with data) as expected.

[tomkralidis]

cc'ing Paul for comments.

[tomkralidis]

Any thoughts on this one?

[pramsey]

No thoughts. Bytea casts to ::text just fine, and that was my only SWAG. Attach a table dump, a corresponding map file and a WFS request URL, to make life easy for any potential debugger.

[tomkralidis]

test case to reproduce this issue

[tomkralidis]

Test case attached to this ticket, which reproduces the error (see README)

[pramsey]

OK, I was wrong, it's not generally possible to case bytea to text, except in PostgreSQL 8.3. In 8.2, I get this:

ERROR: cannot cast type bytea to text

Which is too bad, since Mapserver requires everything cast to text in order to return it.

So, two fixes, neither of them at the Mapserver end: upgrade to 8.3 or add a CAST to your current installation to take bytea to text.

create or replace function bytea2text ( bytea )returns text language sql as 'select encode( $1 , hex )'; create cast (bytea as text) with function bytea2text(bytea);