unwanted varchar to BLOB conversion in ArcGIS

Question

I have a field in a table that holds a unique URL for each record. The URL is the same except for an ID number calculated into it from the first column by use of a function. My function works great and the urls work great but when this data is pulled into esri arcmap through a server connection my field is converted to BLOB data type!

ESRI SAYS: ArcMap can only read the first 255 characters of a cell. If you have more characters than that, ArcMap converts the field to a BLOB type and you won't be able to read its contents.

But... I checked and the most characters I have in a cell is 83!

Anyone know what is going on here? How can I keep esri from converting my nice string to an ugly and unusable BLOB data type?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer

Tom

Answer 1

Figured this out just now, the view I access the result of my function through was redefining the length of the data type as MAX! so I CAST the value as varchar(100) and no more blob!