The first is to ensure the image is of a sufficient size and quality.  There is no point in trying to display a large high quality image as a thumbnail on your report. Use one of the image editing programs to create an image you can display at an adequate resolution and size.  

The format of the image is also important. While a BMP is a fairly universal format, it can require a large space. So it might be desirable to convert the image to a compressed format like JPG. Crystal Reports supports several formats.

Interestingly, it does not support the GIF format. Special thanks to Tim Simmons of General Systems Services for making us aware of this limitation.

The next question to answer is how to get the image into your Crystal Report.  In the past, we thought the only answer was to use the Database approach. But, there are several other approaches. Let's take a look at three of these....  

1. Database solution: Easy, but requires significant disk space

You can store image data in fields in your database. MS access calls these OLE fields, while Oracle and SQL Server refer to them as BLOB (Binary Large Object) fields.

An example of this technique is the Xtreme sample database supplied with Crystal Reports. In the Employee table is a field containing the photo of each employee. You just place these fields on your report in a similar way to other fields.  

On the positive side, you can directly relate an image field to database values. On the negative side, these images can take up considerable space inside your database. This means they can also have an adverse effect on performance and storage.

2. Developer Solution: Restricted functionality and requires a developer

In some Crystal Reports books, we have read about how you can write a Crystal Report viewer in a language such as Visual Basic. Inside your program you can trap such events as the formatting of a section, and you could then change the OLE objects in your report to load a different image.  

On the positive side, this lets you loosely couple your data and images. On the negative side, it requires a complex application to be developed and it will work with only specific reports. We were considering developing such a viewer until we came upon the following two techniques. We also heard recently that the format event is not available to CR9 developers.  

Driver Solution: Fast and flexible 3rd party product.

One of the great features in Crystal Reports 8 and 9 is that you can use a COM data source. This means you can create a recordset from within some application code and then use it as the source of data for your report. And even better is you don't have to write, test, and rewrite your own. We have done all the work for you!

Now you can dress up your reports the easy way, with cViewIMAGE. To find out more, click here:

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Screen=PROD&Product_Code=CHELSEA-CVIEWIMAGE

We have developed cViewIMAGE, a com data source that takes three fields from any ODBC table (an identifier, a description and a filename of the image file). The COM data source creates a fourth field, which is the image that the file name contains. Use this in a subreport to display that filename as an image in your report.

The big benefit is that the entire recordset gets loaded into memory, so it is very fast to load and process some images, and it is totally flexible about what images and database fields you use. It just requires an ODBC data source.

On the negative side, some initial setup is required to identify the location of the image, but we have made our driver flexible so you can support multiple configurations.  We might even create an expanded version to include all the other fields in the table.  Let us know if this is of interest.  

cViewIMAGE is a COM data driver that can reference an image file in a field and return the embedded image to use in your report. This is a very handy utility--we all know a picture is worth a thousand words--why not add that power to your Crystal Reports?

cViewIMAGE: Pricing | Buy Now