How can I insert pictures in BLOB fields

Hi, I have some troubles with inserting a picture (BMP) in a BLOB field. How can I do that (I didn’t find any usable explanation in a user manual)? Thanks, Andrej

When this concerns the picture of an Item, go to the Item Card, click on the Item menu button at the bottom, select Picture. The picture form has a button Import on it. The same for i.e. employees. John

a few weeks ago I tried to export (via ODBC) the pictures from our NF database to an Access DB. It did’nt work. Our NSC told us this was not possible due to the special format in which pictures are stored in Navisison. Is there a workaround for this problem ?

Navision stores blobs in a compressed format to save space in the database. The compression format is not published. As workaround, however, you can Export the blob to a (temporary) *.bmp file, then import it into the other system. Depending on the kind of pictures (photo’s?), an alternative might be to store the pictures in a separate directory and only load these “on the fly” when the picture is to be shown. This allows, for example, to keep the pictures in a high-resolution compressed format (i.e. JPG) available for multiple use. Recently, I have developed a “on the fly” picture convertor for this purpose, that accepts many graphic formats (JPG, GIF, WMF, etc.) and silently (no screen action seen) converts these into the BMP format for display in Navision. If interested, post a reply here. John

I am interested in learning more about your product. I have one question which is worth posting to the forum: How do you specify the directory where the images are stored. Do you have to have a shared volume which has the same letter (and the same directory path) on every machine which uses Navision? Do you set a global variable in the MSDOS Environment (yecch! But I’ve done it myself.) Do you have a Navision table which contains pathnames (or even filenames)? How does it work? ------- Tim Horrigan

Tim, The Picture Convertor is a separate program (written in VB) which takes commandline parameters for and . A check is done if the file exists. The program itself is started with the C/AL SHELL function. In the solution described, I have put the call in the OnOpen trigger of the picture form, with some checks if the picture-blob contains data or not. Naming structure of the picture files and directories is up to you. With our customer, the convention was made to name the picture files as “photo_.jpg” and a field was added to a setup table to hold the directory name at the server. Makes a nice combination with the standalone Item Viewer (also a VB program) to show the list of items outside Navision, and also shows the same pictures. If you want to get a copy of the (free) program(s), drop me a mail. Give me a few days to respond though, I’m currently fully tied up with finishing a large project for Cisco Systems ( ! ), which are now using Navision to control their European demo depot warehouse. Quite nice system we built there, by the way, with lots of specials like order input through an Oracle webbased ordering system, orderstatus feedback and item availability overviews through Java based webpages (very fast performance - pagebuilding outperfoms Navision!), barcodes, warehouse routing for orderpicking, etc. A Reference Story is planned to be written after the startup phase. John