According to http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html, 'BLOB. The value is a blob of data, stored exactly as it was input.'. Currently in WebKit & Safari, the implementation seems to convert the JavaScript object to a string "[object Object]". It would be great if it were possible to store JavaScript objects and JSON objects within the database as BLOB and as objects and not as string representations. Currently, only a string de/serialization would work, but that can be expensive, especially when trying to run Safari on iPhone which has very limited JavaScript execution time.
Created attachment 20897 [details] Test page A simple test page showing storing an object literal as BLOB. Currently the alert displays the type of data after SELECT as string.
SQLite documentation is only tangentially related to HTML5 storage, because there are at least two other type systems to consider - first, there is JavaScript, and then, there is DOM. And anyway, BLOB is not magic - it's just a special kind of string suitable for storing large amounts of data. Yet, it does seem a little weird that a function is stringified like "[object Object]" in this test case - e.g. alert(selectData) successfully shows its source, and one could expect the same here.
Thank you for clarifying about the SQLite & HTML5 storage differences. Do you have any recommendations on how I should store the object, without converting it to a String. In my current app, this conversion takes too long. Or is this a bug which will need to be fixed in WebKit? thanks Jayant (In reply to comment #2) > SQLite documentation is only tangentially related to HTML5 storage, because > there are at least two other type systems to consider - first, there is > JavaScript, and then, there is DOM. And anyway, BLOB is not magic - it's just a > special kind of string suitable for storing large amounts of data. > > Yet, it does seem a little weird that a function is stringified like "[object > Object]" in this test case - e.g. alert(selectData) successfully shows its > source, and one could expect the same here. >
I don't think there is any way to store an object without turning it into a string. You may want to join WHATWG <http://www.whatwg.org/> and describe your use case in an e-mail to its list for people working on the specification to consider it. Brady, what do you think? Does our implicit stringification appear broken, as I wondered in comment 2?
JSON.stringify would appear to accomplish what is being requested here
(In reply to comment #5) > JSON.stringify would appear to accomplish what is being requested here As an addendum, our postMesage serialisation is a flat binary storage system that supports avariety of dom objects and allows cyclic graphs, maybe that would be superior?
This should be standardized first as suggested above. But also, as suggested above, there's ample alternatives available.