How to create a report with an image (.jpeg) field

I got a requirement from one of my clients to build a report having photograph on it. It is a report used by HR department to keep along with the personal/academic/experience records for each employee of the organization. This report was named as ‘ Employee Photograph report’.

This requirement leads me to find out the way of converting BLOB ( photographs are stored as BLOB in HR table) to CLOB and use that in a XML PUBLISHER report template.

This is how it was achieved step by step:

Write a BLOB TO CLOB converter db function as below and compile in the database. 

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION APPS.getbase64( p_source BLOB )
RETURN CLOB
IS
v_result CLOB ;
BEGIN
--dbms_lob.freetemporary(v_result);
DBMS_LOB.createtemporary(lob_loc => v_result, CACHE => False, dur => 0);
Wf_Mail_Util.EncodeBLOB ( p_source, v_result);
RETURN ( v_result );
END getbase64;

Build the report and call the above BLOB to CLOB converter function from the report query as shown below:

In  my case employee photographs were stored in PER_IMAGES table in IMAGE column.

SAMPLE REPORT QUERY

——————————–

SELECT  pa.person_id
              ,pa.employee_number
              ,pa.full_name
              ,getbase64(PerImageEO.IMAGE) IMAGE1
FROM     per_all_people_f pa
              ,PER_IMAGES PerImageEO
WHERE PerImageEO.PARENT_ID=pa.employee_number

Since this is a XML publisher report I had to prepare the  template and incorporate the photograph tag  as well and below is the illustration for the same:

THE TEMPLATE

Now the IMAGE field show above is the place where the Photo of the employee should come.:

Below is the code need to put in the tag:

<?if:IMAGE1!=''?>
<fo:<span class="hiddenSpellError">instream-foreign-object</span> content-type=”image/jpg”>
<?end if?>

The ‘ IF’  clause is added to handle the employee records without photograph in the table.

Place the rdf and register as usual like any other XML publisher report.