I had a request to post on how you could replace characters within a Blob field in the SalesLogix database. Blob fields are database fields that hold any sort of binary information (such as text, images, audio, etc..), but SalesLogix uses them primarily for holding large amounts of text, since you don't have to define a field length. The Longnotes field in the History table is a good example.

Updating these types of fields is simple. You can perform a SQL update statement like you would on any other type of field in the database. The only caveat is that you need to perform a cast on the blob field so that it is evaluated as a VarChar, otherwise you will get an error regarding the Blob datatype.

The update will only be performed for the length you specify in your cast, therefore you'll need to cast it large enough to encompass the largest amount of data you may have in that field.

If you wanted to replace any instance of the "pipe" symbol ( | ) with the "at" symbol ( @ ) for example, you could perform the following update:

 update HISTORY set LONGNOTES = REPLACE(cast(LONGNOTES as varchar(5000)), '|', '@')

Note that I am casting the Longnotes field to a VarChar with a length of 5000.  In most cases, that should be plenty of space to include all text, but your situation may require a larger cast.

This statement can be ran directly in the SQL Server Management Studio or Query Analyzer, or if you have a LAN system and need to consider synchronization, you can run this in the Execute SQL functionality under the Tools menu in the SalesLogix Workgroup Administrator.  Since the data is being updated directly in the SQL database, this will work for both LAN and Web implementations.

Keep in mind that the History.Notes field contains the first 255 characters of the History.Longnotes field for display purposes, so you would want to perform the same update on both fields.

Thanks for reading!