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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
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    #1

    photo

    Is there a way to insert a Macromedia Fireworks photo .png
    in a field? and how do you adjust the inage field size?

    Ken
    Tags: None
    #2
    RE: photo

    Ken,

    The only way that I know of getting images other than *.bmp or *.jpg into a form is to either add an OLE field to the table structure or add an OLE object to the form. Next you will need an OLE server like Corel draw, or some other image editing software that can act as the OLE server for the *.png image. As for adjusting the size of the image, you have to use one of the image size properties that Alpha5 provides... "Absolute" "Best Fit" "stretch" or "Tile"

    Is there some reason that you need the *.png format for the image? If you have a large number of records that will have images in the database, it will be more time consuming, not to mention that embedding images will bloat your database.....


    doug

    Comment

      #3
      RE: photo

      I have a large number of photos fireworks ready for index cards. Is there a reason Alpha does not support .png.

      Thanks

      Ken

      Comment

        #4
        RE: photo

        Ken

        There are many programs that don't support .png, including some graphics programs. Until A5V5, Alpah only supported .bmp images. Bitmaps and jpegs are the most common image file types and nearly any graphics program can convert most other types to them. Compupic from Photodex has a batch option that allows you to select a large number of files and convert them in a couple key strokes.

        Jerry

        Comment

          #5
          RE: photo

          Check out the png_to_bitmap() function. I don't know if/where we've documented it, but it appears in bubble help to get you pointed in the right direction at least. It should allow you to create a script to convert each PNG to a BMP and then store the BMP in Alpha

          -Lenny

          Lenny Forziati
          Vice President, Internet Products and Technical Services
          Alpha Software Corporation

          Comment

            #6
            RE: photo

            Doug

            I am not yet a user of Alpha Five but I have hit the wall with Access. The problem is that when I embed a photo into a table it goes in as an OLE file with an enormous amount of overhead ( a 4k gif will add 100k to the database and if you are wanting to potentially store thousands of images this is unacceptable. The question is does alpha five efficiently store Gifs or is it like access. I don't want to go through the loop of learning a new database if it can't handle this problem.

            Thank You

            Malcolm Windett

            Comment

              #7
              RE: photo

              The answer to your problem in Alpha as well as in Access is to not import the file into the DB but rather to just store a referrence to the file.

              Keep the images in a file directory on the server and manage the image links in the DB - you could provide additional info such as Title, Size, Lot#, Category....to sort and search the referrence links just the same as if the images were in the DB.
              Marc King
              A5solutions

              Comment

                #8
                RE: photo

                Mark
                Thanks for your reply. I had thought of that but discounted it because the problem with linking is that engineers will access this database over the internet and access a Front End Database. The pictures that they have taken will be on their laptops and they will not have access to anything other than the database. This makes it difficult to store the pictures outside the database and to automatically force a link to the table field that they are filling. I currently present them with a browse window and they can then just browse to the picture and download it direct to the database, It works fine accept that the OLE overhead adds to the size of the Database even a 4k gif increases the database by over 100k, larger files it gets even worse as the overhead does not seem to be fixed. The Microsoft help file says that this will be the case with Access so I am looking for a DB that does not exhibit this characteristic, or alternatively if you or anyone that readfs this can think of a way of making linking work in this scenario I would be interested to know.

                Thanks once again

                Regards

                Malcolm

                Comment

                  #9
                  RE: photo

                  One of the biggest problems in a business environment is that its sometimes too easy to assume that a DataBase is the correct solution for your needs.

                  If you just want to manage thousands of images from the web and give your engineers the ability to upload their image files on the fly there are PERL based solutions that are designed specifically to suite your needs.

                  Check out this: www.imagefolio.com

                  Marc
                  Marc King
                  A5solutions

                  Comment

                    #10
                    RE: photo

                    Hi Malcolm,

                    It seems to me you might solve this by having a couple of separate tables on the engineers' machines.

                    Table1 would hold details of the image (Image_ID, Description, Date_Last_Updated etc) and whether or not the engineer wanted to retain it on their machine long term (Store_Locally), and the Table2 would hold just the actual image and the Image_ID.

                    When the engineer connects, you make a new table (Temp Table2) and populate it according to the data in Table1. If the connection is successful, you overwrite the ACTUAL FILE for Table2 with the ACTUAL FILE from Temp Table2 at which point the engineer will have only those images they want to retain locally, along with those for the next job. If the engineers have slow remote access, you could even have interim updates that add images for the next job, but do not update any other images.

                    You could even add various rules governing how often the engineer must update all images or even individual images (eg don't display unless Image_Age

                    Comment

                      #11
                      RE: photo

                      I think that static activeX will help. Take a look at the microsoft ActiveX image control. That should do the trick.

                      Comment

                        #12
                        RE: photo

                        Not quite sure what happened on my prev post but it seem to have chopped the last but one para. It was pretty intuitive, but here it is again anyway:

                        Hi Malcolm,

                        It seems to me you might solve this by having a couple of separate tables on the engineers' machines.

                        Table1 would hold details of the image (Image_ID, Description, Date_Last_Updated etc) and whether or not the engineer wanted to retain it on their machine long term (Store_Locally), and the Table2 would hold just the actual image and the Image_ID.

                        When the engineer connects, you make a new table (Temp Table2) and populate it according to the data in Table1. If the connection is successful, you overwrite the ACTUAL FILE for Table2 with the ACTUAL FILE from Temp Table2 at which point the engineer will have only those images they want to retain locally, along with those for the next job. If the engineers have slow remote access, you could even have interim updates that add images for the next job, but do not update any other images.

                        You could even add various rules governing how often the engineer must update all images or even individual images (eg don't display unless Image_Age

                        Comment

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