How to Upload or Change an image in the Crystal Report at runtime

I decided to write this article after realizing how many people have trouble with letting the user upload an image to their crystal report. Say for an example if the user wants to change or upload their logo onto the crystal report. How can you do this? How the developers can provide this facility to the users?

We all know that users cannot customize crystal reports much. Once the crystal report is generated, users don't have much of a choice to change the fields as they wish. This article is going to demonstrate how can the user upload or change an image on the crystal report.

This is actually a very simple example. Even if you have a novice knowledge about Crystal reports you will be able to understand how this works. I am using Crystal reports 11 for this demonstration.

To start off from the beginning, create a new windows application and add a crystal report viewer and a browse button.

This browse button will allow the user to add an image to the report. Add a crystal report into your project.

Report Schema:

We all know that we need to provide a schema for the crystal repot. Here is an XML view of the report schema that we are going to supply for the report.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<xs:schema id="NewDataSet" xmlns="" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:msdata="urn:schemas-
microsoft-com:xml-msdata">
<xs:element name="NewDataSet" msdata:IsDataSet="true" msdata:Locale="en-AU">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:choice maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xs:element name="Images">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="path" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" />
<xs:element name="image" type="xs:base64Binary" minOccurs="0" />
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
</xs:choice>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
</xs:schema>

BLOB field:

In order to add an image to the crystal report (considering the image field is coming from the database) we need to have a BLOB field in the schema. When you want to store images, documents or different custom types in the database you use a BLOB field. BLOB stands for Binary Large Object.

<xs:element name="path" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" />
<xs:element name="image" type="xs:base64Binary" minOccurs="0" />

If you inspect this schema we can see that we have a table called "Images" and two columns "path" and "image". "image" column is type Base64 Binary. This is our BLOB field.What we are going to do in our program is when the user selects the image to upload we store that image in a BLOB field as a stream of bytes and then supply that dataset to the report.

CreateTable() method will illustrate how to generate this schema in the program.

Generating the schema for the report:

There are other ways you can create the schema but this will give you a clearer idea about the column fields.

Creating the table:

private void CreateTable()

{

//create a new data set.

this.DsImages = new DataSet();

//create a new table with two columns and add the table to the
dataset

DataTable ImageTable = new DataTable("Images");