Displaying a photo dynamically?

Hey all, I'm still working on my actuate to birt upgrade and I hit another wall

. I'm trying to generate an image in a birt report I'm writing dynamically. In actuate we'd generate the correct image by having the url saved to our database. For example: If in our system (maximo) you had an entry of Cat and you attached a photo of a cat using attach document it would save http://www.blahblah.com/cat.jpg to the 'urlname' field in our oracle database. If you had an entry of Dog and you attached a photo it would save it as http://www.blahblah.com/dog.jpg to the 'urlname' field in our oracle database.

I use to just be able to put that urlname field in an image control in actuate and it would generate when I ran the report through maximo. Now I don't know how to do it in Birt. Any advice???

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mwilliams

If your URL is a field in your database, you can use the expression builder under the URI option to access that field. If you only have "cat" or "dog" as your field, you could build the appropriate URL in the same expression builder. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Let me know.

megabri

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' data-author="'mwilliams'" data-cid="107846" data-time="1343926417" data-date="02 August 2012 - 09:53 AM">
If your URL is a field in your database, you can use the expression builder under the URI option to access that field. If you only have "cat" or "dog" as your field, you could build the appropriate URL in the same expression builder. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Let me know. </blockquote>
You have the right idea, I was just using cat and dog as an example. I actually have thousands of entries in this one table. I worked a little more and figured out the URI was the way to go. The only issue I'm having now is trying to convert the way the url is saved to the database so it can display the image in the report. My actuate use to work with maximo properties and be able to substitute \\camsengprd\DOCLINKS to <a class='bbc_url' href='http://camsengprd/DOCLINKS'>http://camsengprd/DOCLINKS</a> so my image would display. I don't know how to get birt to use maximo properties now

mwilliams

If it's just as simple as that, each time, you could just write a script to replace "\\" with "http://" and all remaining "\" with "/". You can also make properties files available to your report by selecting a blank space in your report and going to the resources section of the property editor. Here, you'll see a section where you can add properties files from your shared resources folder.

megabri

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' data-author="'mwilliams'" data-cid="107849" data-time="1343929849" data-date="02 August 2012 - 10:50 AM">
If it's just as simple as that, each time, you could just write a script to replace "\\" with "http://" and all remaining "\" with "/". You can also make properties files available to your report by selecting a blank space in your report and going to the resources section of the property editor. Here, you'll see a section where you can add properties files from your shared resources folder. </blockquote>
What section of the report should I put this code in? Do you mean do a string replace on a field?

mwilliams

You can put the code to do the replace in the expression builder for your URI.

megabri

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' data-author="'mwilliams'" data-cid="108181" data-time="1344263450" data-date="06 August 2012 - 07:30 AM">
You can put the code to do the replace in the expression builder for your URI. </blockquote>
Thanks, that worked. I'm having a different image problem now. Maybe you guru's can figure it out

. I got my image to display via a url but now the first image that is displayed keeps displaying on every row. I'll attach an example, you can see the 2 different urls that should pull back 2 different images... but the same image is displayed twice. 
 
Also, any idea how to show these images in PDF's? The images currently don't display in PDF format.

megabri

It's weird, it looks like it's fetching all the text lines everytime a row is generated but it only fetches the image url once (even though the url changes). Is there something I maybe have to put in the onRender function to have the image re-fetch every time a new line is generated?

CBR

are you referencing the image url as dataSetRow[...] or row[...] in your code?
It should always be row because it gives context to the current row. if you are using dataSetRow to reference a column value it is sometimes only getting the value for that column for the first row because it is missing context.

megabri

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' data-author="'cbrell'" data-cid="108192" data-time="1344267798" data-date="06 August 2012 - 08:43 AM">
are you referencing the image url as dataSetRow[...] or row[...] in your code? 
It should always be row because it gives context to the current row. if you are using dataSetRow to reference a column value it is sometimes only getting the value for that column for the first row because it is missing context. </blockquote>
I'm referencing it with row[...] in the URI section.

VHSteve

<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="mwilliams" data-cid="108181" data-time="1344263450"><div>You can put the code to do the replace in the expression builder for your URI.</div></blockquote> Sorry to reply to an old forum thread, but it seems the original poster wanted to do the same thing I want to do. When I add an image to BIRT, what should I select, URI, Image file in shared resources, Embedded image, Dynamic image? I also need to do the replace to change '' to 'http://' and '' to '/'. My column is currently showing row["urlname"]. How do I amend this to make the replacements?