Jsforce: Retreiving blob values as text

[zestyphresh]

Hi, the new 'Notes' beta saves all content as a blob filetype and while I understand how to output a blob to a file I am wondering if there is a way to convert the blob to text? I am conscious this may not be good practice but before I revert back to the old notes I thought i'd check first. It's not possible with Remote Objects either just in case...

I have the content URI which is in the format;

/services/data/v33.0/sobjects/ContentNote/{id}/Content

[stomita]

You can convert the stream to string.

var contentStream = conn.sobject('ContentNote').record(id).blob('Content');
var buf = [];
contentStream.on('data', function(data, enc) {
  buf.push(data.toString(enc));
});
contentStream.on('end', function() {
  var contentStr = buf.join('');
  // handle contentStr
});

[akve]

ah, here is the correct way to get the blob! :)

[pordonez]

Does this approach work in the browser? I'm able to access the blob, and I can see the blob data being returned in a response object, but my event handlers are not being called, and it's not clear how to access the response object. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[pordonez]

Get around my issue by using the Connection.request() method instead of blob().

[kennethdammyr]

If you want to get data from the Attachment-object, you could do this almost the same way, but you should use Buffer.concat(buf), instead of buf.join('') and skip the toString-decoding.

[vmvargas]

I'm facing the same issue as @pordonez. Would you mind elaborating how you solve it? I haven't found any documentation about it and I think @stomita snippet is outdated.

[dillmo]

Connection.request gave me a headache when retrieving images. The response was always a garbled Unicode string. The Fetch API gave me no such issues.

// response.Body will store the API route to the image
const response = await conn
  .sobject('Attachment')
  .retrieve(id)
  .catch(handleConnectionError);

// we use fetch instead of jsforce.Connection.retrieve because jsforce
// can return a garbled string when downloading images
const fetchResponse = await fetch(`${conn.instanceUrl}/${response.Body}`, {
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${conn.accessToken}` },
});
const blob = await fetchResponse.blob();

// return the blob instead if you don't need an src url
return URL.createObjectURL(blob);