How to produce a report with unique image per record

[Striderman]

I have a property database drawing from ODBC sources and would like to be
able to run a report which includes an image - either a plan or a photograph
- which will be unique to the record displayed. I have a field which records
as flat text a path on my network to the required file. I have set up a query
which draws together all of the data but need to add an object to the report
that will open the network link stored in the field as an image in the report.

 

[Rick Brandt]

I have a property database drawing from ODBC sources and would like to
be able to run a report which includes an image - either a plan or a
photograph - which will be unique to the record displayed. I have a
field which records as flat text a path on my network to the required
file. I have set up a query which draws together all of the data but
need to add an object to the report that will open the network link
stored in the field as an image in the report.

I believe only Access 2007 has that capability (at least in the specs).
The only way to do image-per-record in older versions was with a bound
object frame control which meant storing the images in your database.
Doing that is almost universally considered a bad idea due to the severe
bloat that Access suffers when storing binary data (also supposedly fixed
in Access 2007).

The Image control can display an image by being given a path to the file
on disk, but until 2007 that path could not be bound to a text field in
the report or form's Recordsource so thus, no image-per-record. 2007
added that capability. I have no idea how well it works.

 

[John Spencer (MVP)]

The sample imaging databases at http://accdevel.tripod.com illustrate three
approaches to handling images in Access, and the download includes an
article discussing considerations in choosing an approach. Two of the
approaches do not use OLE Objects and, thus, avoid the database bloat, and
some other problems, associated with images in OLE Objects.

If you are printing the images in reports, to avoid memory leakage, you
should also see MVP Stephen Lebans' http://www.lebans.com/printfailures.htm.
PrintFailure.zip is an Access97 MDB containing a report that fails during
the Access formatting process prior to being spooled to the Printer Driver.
This MDB also contains code showing how to convert the contents of the Image
control to a Bitmap file prior to printing. This helps alleviate the "Out of
Memory" error that can popup when printing image intensive reports.

John Spencer
Access MVP 2002-2005, 2007-2009
The Hilltop Institute
University of Maryland Baltimore County