Thanks to everyone for all their suggestions! I figured out at least how to get the images I want into the report -- now onwards to scaling issues, which not surprisingly are already a problem. I'll be going over everything everyone has contributed to figure out our best solution for that.

In case you're curious, the solution is based on what Dimitry says in the video Hamutal sent, although I had to add in "\" between the two field names. I checked the Media Path and Filename values when running the report, and saw that there wasn't a "\" at the end of the Media Path value, so it seemed like maybe it wasn't making a full path to the file. So I added one in to the formula in Graphic Location, and voila, the right pictures started showing up. The final formula is {MediaPaths.PhysicalPath}+"\"+{MediaFiles.FileName}, and that seems to be working.

Thanks again!

Best,

Jenny

On Wed, Aug 7, 2019 at 10:21 AM Richard Grant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

This is why we decoupled the Crystal report images from the TMS media file names. We have cases where the object numbers and filenames are different. We created a new folder with all of the image files, sized and saved as bumps. These are not used by TMS, but only for reports. Those files are named with the object numbers in the format I described. It just needs to be a scheme that will allow you to create the file name programmatically in the Media Location Formula. We know this has all the drawbacks one gets from the sin of having duplicate data — primarily making sure the report image in the bmp folder gets updated when an image is replaced in TMS. But it is worth the hassle in order to have images that always print correctly in Crystal. 

On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 5:00 PM Jenny Werner <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Thanks so much for the thorough response, Dick. I'm trying to see if I can adapt your strategy to ours, but one factor is that I work with library material, so the numbering system is a bit complicated (lots of alphanumeric, long descriptive "numbers"), so ObjectNumber and FileName fields are almost the same, but not quite. I'm not sure if that makes a difference.

I was hoping you could clarify one thing -- does that formula in Crystal create a filename that matches the actual filename? Or is it creating something new? Currently our filenames are versions of the object number, but with different punctuation, so I'm wondering if I'd have to rename them all.

When I tried using a version of the formula, I got the "remaining text does not appear to be part of the formula" error message, not sure if you've had that issue before.

Thanks again for your response!

Sincerely,

Jenny

On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 4:19 PM Richard Grant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi Jenny,

We cooked up a method to control image sizes in our reports. We needed to include images of a specific size in reports, with different measurements for vertical and horizontal works, so we created a folder that contained copies of the images sized just the way we want to see them. We named the files in such a way that we didn't have to pull file names from the TMS tables, but rather could build the Media Location formula on the fly from the object number. In our case we wanted to have thumbnails 3 1/2 inches on the long side. Thus our naming convention contains the word "thumb". You could do yours with a meaningful indication of "big". We used a Crystal report to pull the primary file names from the media xrefs, exported it to EXCEL and then  generated a Windows batch file to put them in a folder with the filenames that met our specs. We then sized them with a Photoshop action. Here is the formula in Crystal's Object Location.

"F:\TMSfiles\Images\Thumbnails-BMP\"+"RD"+trim({Objects.ObjectNumber})+"thumb.bmp"

Our object number format is "RD" plus a 4 digit number, so the resulting filename would come out like "RD1234thumb.bmp".

Here is another important discovery that may help. We found that Crystal, for reasons that are still unclear, would sometimes screw up the image size of jpgs or tiffs in a report. A bunch of pages would print correctly, and then one image would be enlarged and exceed the margin on the right-hand side. After many calls to Crystal, we finally hooked up with the right person. He told us that Crystal converts images to BMP format on the fly, and sometimes comes up with wacky dimensions. He said it we use BMP images for Crystal, our problem would disappear. So we ran a Photoshop action to open all of our RD1234thumb.jpg images and save them as RD1234thumb.bmp. Bingo, problem solved. They now print correctly.

Let me know if we can help in any way.

Dick

Richard Grant Executive Director 3214 College Avenue  Berkeley, CA 94705 [log in to unmask] 510.428.1400 ext 4  510.459.4556 mobile Instagram | Twitter

On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 3:07 PM Jenny Werner <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I looked back in the Archives and found an answer to this, but it's not working for me, so I thought I'd see if anyone can shed some light on it.

We have TMS 2012 and Crystal 2011. I'm trying to put non-thumbnail (AKA large) images into certain reports. I found instructions that included inserting a static image, then inserting the formula "{MediaPaths.Path}+{MediaFiles.FileName}" into the "Graphic Location" formula editor in Format Graphic.

I tried this, but the static image remains the same for every object. I have both of those tables included in the report. 

I feel like I'm missing a potentially obvious step, but I can't find any other useful instructions online. I know there are issues about sizing and whatnot, but for now I'd like to at least be able to get the full-size images into the report. 

I welcome any and all advice. I've been working with Crystal for a while but I've never had to build a report with large images from scratch, so I'm not sure how to make it work.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Jenny Werner

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