Adding Pictures to BO 6.5 Reports

building reports desktopintelligence
1

We are developing a report to show customer information. One requirement for these reports is to display the name and a picture of the account officer associated with the customer.

Our initial idea was to save the pictures in a table and make them available in an object in the Universe. However, we checked the Designer manual and it states that the Blob datatype is not available in in version 6.5.

Has anyone been able to add pictures to reports given this limitation?

Fherry :barbados: (BOB member since 2007-03-21)

2

Hi,

What is possible to do is:

  • save all pictures in a shared drive on a network
  • store their paths (in UNC format) in a database
  • fetch into the report these paths
  • change the format of a cell/column that has these paths to Image -> Bitmap/Tiff

And of course, pictures needs to be either in BMP or TIF format. JPG, JPEG, GIF formats will not work, if I remember correctly.

Marek Chladny :slovakia: (BOB member since 2003-11-27)

3

We are trying to test using a bitmap file stored on the same machine that the is being used for development.

The path looks like C:\Document and Settings…\pic

However, the image does not display; instead a diagonal line is showing from one corner to the cell to another.

Fherry :barbados: (BOB member since 2007-03-21)

4

I get the diagonal line in a cell in these cases:

  • there is not such picture that is referenced in the path used in a cell. Either the picture is not there at all or access rights prevents from seeing the picture
  • there is such picture but it’s not real BMP or TIF format

If a BMP/TIF picture is correctly referenced in the path, for instance I use a path like this in a cell

c:\Images\MyLogo.TIF

then when I change the format of the cell to Image → Bitmapp/TIFF then the picture is shown in the cell. That’s how it works on my laptop.

Marek Chladny :slovakia: (BOB member since 2003-11-27)