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Not displaying images? What am I doing wrong?

  • March 29, 2006 at 7:05 am

    #168329

    Hi,

    I've had a search around the forum but can find no reference to this at all.

    I have a report that is reliant on a stored proc. It returns the path to an image ("/images/drawing1.wmf").

    The problem is, no matter what I do, I cannot get it to display the image. I have tried: ="http:/machinename/" & Fields!PICTURE.Value in the Value field, but nothing. Not even an error.

    I have been strugling to do this with Crystal reports for about a fortnight now (uncluding upgrades etc...) and finally gave up and am now trying to use RS (2000).

    I used to be able to do this sort of thing in seconds using MSAccess version 2. Surely this is still possible?

    Thanks in advance.

  • March 29, 2006 at 8:26 am

    #629503

    Did you verify the resulting path?

    You state your data is "/images/drawing1.wmf"

    And you append "http:/machinename/"

    The net result of which is

    http:/machinename//images/drawing1.wmf

    You may simply have the string wrong. Test the net result and see if it would work. If not then start there first and tell us what happens.

  • March 29, 2006 at 8:31 am

    #629505

    Yeah - sorry it was a typo.

    Thanks for the quick reply.

    If I take the string and put it in the address bar of Firefox (or IE) it displays the image perfectly.

    So I know the path is ok.

    It doesn't even display anything in the designer - just the image icon.

  • March 29, 2006 at 9:21 am

    #629533

    After just a bit of digging and testing I now understand why. If you place the url in the image it doesn't show up unless they location is a public (anonymously reachable) location. And you must take into consideration if you are behind a firewall.

    After playing I discovered when I used something like

    "http://www.google.com/intl/en/images/logo.gif"

    the src value in the imag tag was "". Then I tried

    <A href="http:///Reports/images/48folderopen.jpg">http://<servername>/Reports/images/48folderopen.jpg

    And got the same thing.

    So I tried another icon from a public location behind my firewall and it worked. But instead of being the URL I typed it was instead

    <A href="http:///ReportServer?%2fTest%2fReport1&amp;rs%3aFormat=HTML4.0&amp;rs%3aImageID=dac41d9d-4265-4ae2-8260-21d3888f92e0">http://<servername>/ReportServer?%2fTest%2fReport1&amp;rs%3aFormat=HTML4.0&amp;rs%3aImageID=dac41d9d-4265-4ae2-8260-21d3888f92e0

    With that in mind what is happening is Reporting Services actually connects to the remote URL and if it can access the system it will pull the image and cache itself then send to the client in the generated report.

    After some looking I found that you can also follow the information in the topic of RS BOL

    "Configuring an Account for Unattended Report Processing"

    to configure a specific account for connecting to the remote source (if authentication is passed the NT way as far as I know).

    Seems MS went out of their way on this one, dropped the whole K.I.S.S. method in mind and decided for a consistany approach. Not sure if they are going to do anything with changing this and haven't found a good workaround yet.

  • March 29, 2006 at 10:20 am

    #629576

    Thanks for the reply.

    The whole webserver is now set up for anon access, the images already were, but I'm banging my head on a brick wall.

    After nearly 3 weeks with this (and Crystal) for such a simple report, I'm about to give up and use MS Access, have it sit on a server somewhere constantly polling a table and have the application put a record into the table when it wants the report, and make it print to the users local (networked) printer.

    It seems incredible that reporting engines have gone backwards - but I suppose that's progress 😉

    Cheers.

  • March 29, 2006 at 12:24 pm

    #629627

    So I take it didn't work for you? I was able to get it to work for me. You do have the image defined as external right?

  • March 30, 2006 at 1:20 am

    #629727

    Hi, yes the image is set as external in the properties.

    Sorry for the rant last night - it wasn't aimed at you 🙂

    I'm having a nightmare with it to be honest - When I deploy now it looks at the wrong server (and the image still won't display), yet in the Data tab it's looking at the correct server (the servers are Dev and Live).

  • March 30, 2006 at 1:30 am

    #629730

    Bizarre - a reboot (of my local machine - not the server) sorted it out (the data problem at least).

    The image problem was that the files were WMF files - I've converted them to GIF and with the reboot it's looking at the correct server now - AND IT DISPLAYS THE IMAGES!!!!

    Yes!

    At last.

    Thanks for your patience with me - much appreciated.

    All I have to do now is make it print from a PDF document on the click of a button 😉

    Well, always the best way to learn (deep end syndrome).

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