Moreso a question of possibility than looking for assistance, but for example if we have a salesperson who wants to attach an image to a quote, is there a way to do this without heavily modifying the .rdl?
I imagine a way of completing this would be to attach the image as a link/copy to the quote line, and during the creation of the quote, SSRS would put the image in to the placeholder in the template.
However, I guess I am looking for a more ‘native’ way of doing this, if there is any, like inserting a link directly in the ‘line comment’ field or something along those lines. Not sure if this question makes any sense, but any assistance in the matter is greatly appreciated.
Something I’ll be playing with out of hours anyways to try and implement as I can see its usefulness to our team, if I find anything I’ll make sure to keep this thread posted
In my opinion, be careful what they ask for…. on this subject I came from a company where the sales people wanted to add images on quotes. It turned out they wanted to add part images that were not our parts (we resold parts for some distribution company that were not part of our product line). Of course I freaked because we did not have permission to use those images.
In other words…be careful what you want to give to others to do….you may not want them to do this on their own.
We have 1 image per quote line. We use Crystal Reports, but I would assume it would be quite similiar in SSRS.
Set up a UD text field against the quote line (quotedtl table). Users put their URL into that field. The report then generates the picture from the URL.
For us, we found that all the pictures needed to be in the same aspect ratio, otherwise stretching/distortion occurred on the quote form. This is due to the way the report was set up. I don’t know if SSRS can dynamically scale jpg files to correct for aspect ratio?
Also, the quote images need to be saved in a centralised library on your server in a “do not move, do not rename” type situation. Because in Quote Entry, your images are just URLs. If the URL location changes, your image link will be broken.
I agree whole heartedly. We manufacture a lot of the items we sell, and we sometimes have the complete drawing of the assembly as an image that shows the client what it is they’re buying/contracting. However the issue of buying parts then selling on might come in to play, and as such will be important to track.
Both ideas are awesome, I’ll have a play around with both and see how they work for what I need them to do. I might end up going with a referential link rather than a base64 encoded UD column as the size of the database will grow with each image, and directly maintaining that may cause heartaches - but that isn’t to say it’s a bad idea, because I really like the simplicity of it.
Another alternative would be to look at Part Entry and see how Epicor is adding images to parts and replicate that with custom code in Quotes. Then from there just use the image path in your report.
