Getting number fields back from Oracle

[mclagett]

I am being driven absolutely mad. As part of a generic data access library
that was originally written on top of Oracle's OCI and Pro-C libraries but
that I am now porting to ADO.NET I am trying to write some generic code to
process a DataReader. I am using the GetValues() call to return an array of
Object^ refs that I am then trying to process with a bunch of templated code.
I originally attempted to read back some Oracle Number fields into Int32
variables allocated from the managed heap, but got back a message telling me
that a System.Decimal could not be cast to an Int32. Fair enough; that's
when I realized that Oracle Numbers are first brought back to the client as
Decimal types. Unfortunately, however, the Decimal type does not have a copy
constructor, so that broke a number of places in my generic code. I have
since been trying to do explicit conversions with specialized template
functors, but am being thwarted at every turn. I am now trying to get these
Decimals into OracleNumber objects, because at least these can be copy
constructed and will play nicely with code I already have in place. I was
hoping the following would work:

template<> struct ABIMConversion<OracleNumber^>
{
OracleNumber^ operator()(Object^ h) { return (OracleNumber^)h ; }
};

This compiles fine, but unfortunately at run time I get the error:bUnable to
cast object of type System.Decimal to type
System.Data.OracleClient.OracleNumber. Okay. Then I tried to a construct an
Oracle Number with the constructor that takes a Decimal parameter:

template<> struct ABIMConversion<OracleNumber^>
{
OracleNumber^ operator()(Decimal^ h) { return gcnew OracleNumber(h) ; }
};

This refuses to compile with a (to me, seemingly bizzare) message:

Error 1 error C2664:
'System::Data::OracleClient::OracleNumber::OracleN umber(bool)' : cannot
convert parameter 1 from 'System::Decimal ^' to
'bool' c:\abimdataaccesslibrary\DataBinding.h 1529

THere isn't even documented an OracleNumber constructor that takes a bool,
so I really don't understand what's going on. But I'm giving a presentation
on C++/CLI in a day or two and would really love to have this worked out.
Can anyone explain this to me and suggest a workaround?

Much obliged!