CLOB Update Failing On Content Below Character Limit

Question

I am trying to update a CLOB field using form input in ColdFusion 8. The data being submitted is no more than 10KB in size, yet I get the ORA-01704: string literal too long error.

<cfquery name="updatePubs" datasource="#authConfig.getConfigSetting('datasource')#">
  UPDATE members
  SET publication = '#publications#'
  WHERE campus_key = #id#
</cfquery>

Is there an alternate way to do this? It updates fine for data just below 4KB, but above that it throws the error.

Answer 1

Try wrapping the variables within your query with <cfqueryparam> tags. Like this:

<cfquery name="updatePubs" datasource="#authConfig.getConfigSetting('datasource')#">
  UPDATE members
  SET publication = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="CF_SQL_CLOB" value="#publications#">
  WHERE campus_key = <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="CF_SQL_INTEGER" value="#id#">
</cfquery>

Note that I am assuming your id is of type integer in my example.

The <cfqueryparam> tag does the following:

• Allows the use of SQL bind parameters, which improves performance.
• Ensures that variable data matches the specified SQL type.
• Allows long text fields to be updated from a SQL statement.
• Escapes single-quotation marks in string variables.

To benefit from the enhanced performance of bind variables, use cfqueryparam for all ColdFusion variables, and your DBMS must support bind variables. If a DBMS does not support bind parameters, ColdFusion validates and substitutes the validated parameter value back into the string. If validation fails, it returns an error message.

Here is a link to the documentation for cfqueryparam