Not typical data, but maybe applicable to this newsgroup.

[Michael Walsh]

I originally posed this question in the reports forum, but I thought this
forum might be better. My question is about external files more so than data
in the sense that I don't want to read and manipulate external data so much
as I want to read and display external files.

In my database, I've given the enduser the ability to upload files to a
network drive and I record the file name, path, and RecordID in a new table.
I haven't used any type of OLE.

They can click a button to on the record form to open a windows folder with
the related uploaded attachments. However, I haven't develped a report to
display the items. How can I incorporate these attachments of any type
(docs, jpgs, tifs, spreadsheets, etc.) into a report?

Ideally, I'd like to develop a pop-up form that allows the enduser to select
attachment to include or not include, but I haven't even figured out how to
add one attachment of a known type which I think would have to do with
unbound frames.

What do you think?

 

[John Nurick]

Hi Michael,

Basically it's no big deal to display something from an external file in
an objectframe control on a report - but this only works if whatever you
want to display from the external document will fit in objectframe -
which can't be bigger than a page of the report.

If you've just got little bits of things in the external files, see the
sample databases at the end of these links for general approaches:
http://www.datastrat.com/DataStrat2.html
http://accdevel.tripod.com/imaging.htm

But if have multi-page Word documents, worksheets that won't fit on one
page, and so on, things get complicated and the best way to go is
probably to automate Word and Excel to create a Word document containing
what you need.