how to define path in read from file on Reports 6i

[bookouri]

I have an employee photo name (111.jpg, 123.jpg etc) for each employee. I want to display the photo on a Report. The Report Developer documentation says I have to select the column (name of photo), then in the properties for the column on the report choose read from file. When I do this the report says it cant find the file. The documentation says to add the file location to the reports_path in the registry. I tried that but nothing changed. I tried running the report from the directory where the photos reside and it still says it cant find the files. How can I incorporate the path to the image files in my report?
I tried putting '\\myserver\myshare'||photo_id in the select statement to try to build the path into the photo, but when I do that the "read from file" option disappears in developer..

any suggestions would be appreciated...

 

[smart99]

is it a must to store the photos in local dir..

If not you can store the images as Raw files in the database as column and show it on the report.

 

[bookouri]

I could never get the raw columns to work for me. And all the suggestions I got when I was designing the database advised not to store the images in tables but to store them as jpg files. If I could get the images in and out of lob fields it would be great..

 

[smart99]

It is easy to use the raw datatypes for images. Don't use blobs. Blobs can't be controlled in reports.

I have used raw datatypes to store images and created employee reports, its depends how you set the property info for the image items on the reports.

Try to use a report wizard intially with a simple table having few images. Thereby u can know how the image file are created in the reports.

 

[bookouri]

I have an older application that does use Long RAW data types, but if I remember right, Oracle is phasing out the Long Raw data type, so I quit using it and tried to move to Blobs but never managed to make it work...

 

[bookouri]

I fixed the original problem. I had failed to account for null values, assuming that the database was complete and employee Aaron, John did not have a photo and happened to be the Alphabetically first employee so the entire report failed.

Anyway the answer was to include the path in the select statement. So I ended up with something like

select '/staff/pic/'||nvl(photo,'blank.jpg') emp_photo
from emp
where active_flag='Y'

Id still like more information about long raw, blobs and the future best way to do images if anyone has any comments, suggestions etc..