Cut down loading time on report with pictures

[IcePak]

Hello forum,

I have a report that has a page for each of 150 cables. On each page, there's a detail, subreported section and a picture. The pictures path on the harddrive is dependent on a field gathered from the main report's source query.

Now, before I added the picture updating capabilities [so all i had was a simple .gif image set in stone (not variable)] the entire 150 page report would come up within 2 seconds. Now that I made it so that the picture on each page is dependent on the report's data, it takes, honestly 15 minutes to load.

I could understand this if i had 150 different images for 150 different cables, but I'm only referencing 6 possible images.

Access appears to be loading a new image every time. I'm hoping somebody out here knows how to get it to load each image once and then reference them for the remainder of the 150 pages. Maybe a way to store it in RAM and then just reference it (forgive me if that's not the proper pc terminology). I also tried to change the images to 1 bit monochromes, but it didn't really cut time down that much.

Any help would be delightful!
-Mike

 

[mac318]

Mike. If you think about it, all programs will react the same as Access. The report data determines which image to load; therefore, is report is a different report even if they all use the same image. You can download the images once and reuse them by placing the images in a collection and access them locally from the report. Have the report load the images from the collection which is in RAM.

mac

 

[IcePak]

Mac
Thanks for the reply. See that's exactly what I WANT to do. I just haven't been able to do it successfully in Access. How should I go about it?

 

[mac318]

Mike. If you are using 97, use the help and indexes to locate "Collections." If you're using 2000, you will have to use the MSDN library. I can't teach you collections in the newsgroup; however, they are not difficult to use. You can learn what you need to perform your task from the help.

Simply stated, you create a collection object, use its add method to load it with images, use its item property to retrieve a specfic image. I built my first collection using the examples in the help. You can do it. My collection held images of cows.

mac

 

[IcePak]

Thanks alot mac
I'll try it out.