Printing image in crystal report .net

Hi! I'm designing an application that is intended for nurseries, to print Plant signage. I have a database that contains all the information relative to the plants (height, spread, color, hardiness zone, family, description, picture, etc). I had plan to use Crystal Report to print these signage, since it is supposed to be a powerful tool. Everything was fine, until I tried to print Image... I have to print a picture of the plant, wich is a path stored in a string field (e.g.: "c:\application\folder\image.jpg") and some other symbol that are small picture stored as binary field in the database.

So far, I think It's impossible to print image from a location path on a Crystal Report (the latest version, CR XI all allows it, but I would like to do it with .NET version). I googled and looked on other forums , only to find VB6 code to do it, so I guess (I hope...) there is a way to do it with .NET, but I really CAN'T find it... Anyone can confirmed me whether it's possible or not???or does anyone actually know how?

Well thanks a lot for you help, this is really appreciated.. I'll be around to answer your question! Thanks!

please, i really need to know if it is doable...

it seems that this topic is really hard, i am searching and will let you know if i find something

cool!

i have read that crystal reports 11 can do that, but nothing is confirmed.


i read the only way to do so is to bind the report to a datatset that contains an image datatype and treat it as a normal field

any additions to that will be hightly appreciated

I still use CR9 so I don't know if this is still valid but it's worth a shot.

We are going to use the Detail Section's Formatting event to set the picture (you are going to have to add a reference to the Crystal Report ActiveX Design Runtime Library to use this).

In your report, add another field and suppress it so that the data does not show on the report when viewing. This "file name" field is going to contain the file path to the image you want to use.

In the Detail Section's Formatting Event, we are simply going to set the picture field's formatted picture property to be the image that the File Name field's value includes.

example:

VB Code:

Dim bm As New Bitmap(PlantReport1.FileName.Value)
PlantReport1.PlantImage.FormattedPicture = bm

Like I said before, I don't even know if this is still a viable option in CR XI but I thought I'd give my 2 cents.