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Licensing:
The developer license allows you to dynamically include images in your reports. For people to be able to see those images, each client needs a cViewIMAGE seat as well (two free seats come with cViewIMAGE). On the next page, you'll pick your license quantity based on the number of users. |
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Summary
| cViewIMAGE lets you dynamically include images in your Crystal report even if they are not stored in a database. It calculates the file + path name from fields in your database without storing images in your database. Make your reports sharper and more powerful.
Free 30-day trial.
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How it works
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cViewIMAGE allows a developer to design a report that calls images for dynamic inclusion. To see those images, the clients must also have cViewIMAGE installed. cViewIMAGE enables you to include images in your Crystal report even if they are not stored in a database. Hold the reference to the image e.g. c:\Product Images in your database, instead of the image, and cViewIMAGE will retrieve them from the folder for your Crystal report.
You do not need the image to be stored in your database. Your database simply holds the file path to the image, not the image itself. The advantages are that:
Your database is very much smaller than if it were storing images.
It's easier to manage your images. Adding, changing and deleting images is simpler if they are stored in a folder rather than held in a database.How would you use cViewIMAGE to do it? To put your image of say, your product into your Crystal report, you would create a new connection using cViewIMAGE as well as your normal Product database/file connection. Then write a formula to access the file path reference of the image (e.g. c:\Product Images) from your Product database to point cViewIMAGE to the folder/s where your images are filed. Then place the image in your report along with any other information from your Product database.
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Why cViewIMAGE
| Why dynamically include an image in a report? Images are very compelling and give a report great eye appeal. You can use them to convey information in ways that text alone cannot. You probably already guessed we would say it: A picture's worth 1,000 words.
Why use cViewIMAGE to do it? cViewIMAGE offers functionality not available by other means (see the cViewIMAGE v. Crystal XI tab.
cViewIMAGE is one of our best-selling products. Once you start using it, you'll understand why. |
vs. Crystal XI
While XI does support dynamic images using its own mechanism, it still supports cViewIMAGE. The ImageFolder driver in cViewIMAGE brings in all the pictures from a folder--something XI can't do. cViewIMAGE does have functionality which is still not available in Crystal in this form and as far as we are aware, is not planned to be in later versions of Crystal.
So there are still benefits in using cViewIMAGE even if you have Crystal XI or Crystal 2008, depending on what you are trying to do.
By using different arguments, you can pick up different cViewIMAGE COM drivers which provide different functionality.
Functionality available only in cViewIMAGE as far as we are aware:
- cViewIMAGE.ImageFolder enabling you to import an entire folder of images, providing multiple images which can be based on a wild card.
- cViewIMAGE.ImageSize enabling you to specify height and width of your image (from cViewIMAGE version 4)
- cViewIMAGE.ODBCImage enabling you to include a set of fields as well as the embedded image (from cViewIMAGE version 5)
The functionality now available in Crystal XI that is similar to other cViewIMAGE COM drivers: cViewIMAGE.WebImage (from cViewIMAGE version 4) and cViewIMAGE.SingleImage (often used) |
Sizes/Locations
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cViewIMAGE gives you a great deal of flexibility, regarding where you store your images and what sizes they happen to be:
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| Different image sizes
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Images stored in different locations |
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There are issues with different sizes of images and how good different resolutions appear in print. To address many of the issues, we have a driver that enables you to specify the height and width of the image.
To use the driver, select cViewIMAGE.ImageSize instead of the more usual cViewIMAGE.SingleImage.
The major hurdle to overcome is that Crystal Reports has a Fixed/Total image size option when you put an image field on the report. There is no way to dynamically change the size of any object on the page (apart from “Can Grow”).
While you may have many images, you will probably find that there are several basic shapes that most will apply to.
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cViewIMAGE can cope with your images being in different locations as long as you can write a formula to include the conditions on how to find them. There is just one formula to be written to enable cViewIMAGE dynamically link the image reference in the database to the actual location of where the image is stored.
For example, you may have architectural drawings in your c:\Architect folder and your building photographs in d:\Photos.
Or you may have all your drawings named Arch001 etc and your photos named Photos001 etc. If the images are named or located in a way you can describe in a formula, cViewIMAGE can find them and display them in the report using that formula.
Image location on a file share isn’t really a problem but everything works a lot faster if they are on a local drive.
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| “Can Grow” can create very large images on a page. But a better solution is to use conditional sections to control the way to get different shaped pictures on the page.
Create multiple sections in your report with various shapes and the use conditional section suppress to select which section will appear with the correct aspect ratio. The way to do this is have several copies of the same image field from cViewIMAGE record, each with a different height/width ratio. Then you select which image you want based on the size fields in the cViewIMAGE record. The cViewIMAGE.ImageSize fields includes those as extra fields along with the embedded Image.
A formula which calculates the aspect ratio of the image (height/width) is useful here. A value of 1 suggests a square picture, a value of 2 would indicate a portrait orientation and a value of 0.5 would be a landscape image. So this is not totally dynamic sizing, but in reality close enough as most images are in a finite set of sizes. Portrait, Landscape and Square would cover 75 – 90% of most image collections. You can add a few more special sizes if you need them.
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Formats
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cViewIMAGE supports only the Crystal-supported formats. For example, it supports jpg, bmp, and WMF but not GIFF.
Although Portable Document Format (PDF) is popular, it’s not an image format. It is exactly what the name says: a way to preserve formatting of a document for portability..
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