displaying and editing a database with pictures

[TB]

OK, so this probably rates as a rather low-level, newbie question, but
please bear with me:

I am in process of creating a web site that includes a small database where
one of the fields contains pictures.

First I tried to create a DB from Access 2000, from where I also entered a
sample record, including a picture. However when I created a sample data
access page in FP 2002, the only the text and number-based fields of the
record were displayed correctly, while the picture simply showed the word
#binary#, but not the picture.

I have tried the database wizard that comes included with FP 2002, but with
the same result.

I have also tried to use that same database wizard to create a new access
database from scratch, but unfortunately the wizard does not allow for the
creation of fields that contains pictures (or at least that how it seams to
me.)

Any comments / advice would be greatly appreciated. However I am not an ASP
programmer so please keep it basic.

Thanks

Trym

 

[Mark Fitzpatrick]

What you've got is actually rather easy and tricky at the same time. Access,
and other databsases don't actually have image fields. Instead they have
what are called BLOB fields, short for Binary Large Object. A BLOB could
very well be an image, word document, PDF, etc..

Because an image is a binary file it won't mix with the plain text web page
and you can't just drop an image from a database into a web page for that
reason. What you do instead is create a page that doesn't have any HTML in
it at all so the picture can then be dumped directly. You then call this
page that has the image in it just like you would a normal image.

MS has a knowledge base article on how to do this at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;173308

You'll need to do some hand-coding as FrontPage won't do this easily, but
you should be able to figure it out quickly.

Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Microsoft MVP - FrontPage