Once you get AccessImagine registered, you are an developer. Every Access database you create with AccessImagine holds your mark, and appears nice & registered to every user.

The main plot is:

You don’t need to activate AccessImagine on every user’s computer.
Its enough to activate it on PC you are developing the database.

There is one remark to this. When you have developed a database with shareware (non-activated) AccessImagine, and activated it recently, you need to “touch” every AccessImagine component on every form to update it status. “Touch” mean some manipulation like “open form in design view, move component or change some it property back and forth, than close form with saving changes”.

Sure, this topic is not so easy to understand. Please ask questions and we’ll explain better.

Introduction

Microsoft Access continuous form is a special form type, when entire form design is repeated for each record of the data source. It gives you ability to make something different to usual “table-view” approach, hovever you are still limited to “striped” design.

Core problem

Access doesn’t create separate form object for each record. It just makes one form to draw several times with different data. This leads to following limitations:

• Any changes to form controls or properties thru VBA affects appearence of all the records
• Event handlers you suppose to be executed for every record, execute only for the first one
• It is restricted to place ActiveX controls on continuous form

There is no ways to bypass this limitations directly. Remark: this limitations doesn’t apply to header and footer of the form – because it is not dublicated.

FAQ

Once we made thru basics, lets answer the questions. If you have question not being answered here, don’t hesistate to ask it at the bottom of the page.

How can I make controls to look different in different records?

The only way is to use Format->Conditional Formatting feature. In Access 2007 you can put right mouse button on the row title in table view to reach it. Sure, its limited alot, but there is no much choice here.

How can I show pictures from database?

All the methods that utilize regular data-bound controls are valid. You can use Bound Object Frame, in Access 2007 – Attachments and Image controls. However, you can’t use any VBA scripting with em.

How can I show some conditional data or pictures?

The only way to achieve this is to build custom queries, that perform checks and calculations you need and prepare data to show.

How can I show pictures, that are stored externally?

In Access 2007 there is an improvement to regular Image control. It will display image from file, if you bind it to the field or expression that provides image path and filename. This works in continuous forms too.

In pre-2007 versions of Access you need to have picture previews saved in your database as OLE data type. AccessImagine control handles their creation and maintaining easily.

How can I do something, that Access limitations doesn’t allow me to do?

If there is no tricks to save the situation, people usually mimic continuous forms, creating a form that displays several records at once with paging buttons. There are 2 downsides of this approach. First – it requires a lot of VBA coding. Second – you loose all the built-in features users can utilize to any Access form – sorting, search and filters.

Try to avoid this path until you have some time to waste.

Not found an answer you need? Post a question at the bottom!

Techniques demonstrated here:

• thumbnails generation
• continuous forms with pictures
• on-demand AccessImagine installation
• instructing user how to turn active content on

This article shows the proper way of image handling in continuous forms with the help of AccessImagine control. If you are looking for answers on some common questions about continuous forms, check the Continuous forms FAQ.

First of all just imagine one thing: time passed and you’ve got a 1000 pictures or so in your database. Every time you open continuous form with that images, your computer loads all of them at once. Surely it will have the hard time and even can freeze at once.

So what’s the solution? You don’t really need to show big pictures in continuous form. You need thumbnails. Thumbnails in OLE format for Access to handle it properly.

You can download the MDB file with entire solution to play with it:

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Step-by-step

1. Lets assume you have AccessImagine picture control on your record edit form and its called Pic.

2. Create thumbnail field in your table (lets call it Preview) of OLE type.

3. Add On Exit event handler to your Pic control and insert this line:

if Pic.Changed then Preview.Value=Pic.PreviewOLE(128)

Now your Pic control generates a preview every time its picture is changed. Here 128 stands for preview longest side in pixels.

4. Create your continuous form, place Bound Object Frame on it and bind it to Preview field.

Now you’ve got continuous form with pictures, made in proper way.

With the help of AccessImagine you can add rich user experience never seen before when one submits some picture(s) to application. Just take a look at the action video (if you havn’t seen it before).

So, if you use some of the .NET programming languages – Visual Basic, C++ or C# – you can add such a behaivior to your app in few clicks.First, you need AccessImagine ActiveX, download it here (591 Kb) and execute.

After that press right mouse button on your Toolbox and select Choose items… .
On Com Components tab find AccessImaginePicture Control and check it.

Sound tricky a little bit, but you have to do this only once. Now you have AccessImagine in your Toolbox in the Components category.

Database app

If you develop some database application,  you just need to add AccessImagine control to your form and bind its ImageBind property to picture database field. Thats it, up and working.

In case you do not store images in database, but only the filenames set the StoragePath property to place you keep images and make sure that ImageBind is bound to database field which holds the filenames.

Other app

Its not a must to use database for holding images. You can use AccessImagine as you like without any database bindings.

1. It has Image property you can write and read. It is a containing image in JPG format or its filename – if you specified StoragePath.

2. It has Changed function to determine if image has changed.

3. It has LoadFile and SaveFile functions.

You can read more about AccessImagine programming interface here.

Thumbnails generation in Microsoft Access can be done with one  line of code using AccessImagine.

So, lets take all the 3 steps to add thumbs to your pictures in some table.

1. Lets make some place for holding thumbs. Create a new field of OLE (or BLOB) type and call it Preview

2. Then make AccessImagine write a preview – add this line to the Exit event handler of control (lets assume its name is Picture1):

If Picture1.Changed Then Preview.Value = Picture1.PreviewJPG(128)

128 here means that the height (or width, if pic is landscape) will be 128 pixels. If you omit this number, then it will default to 64.

3. Then u need to… emm… Have we promised 3 steps for you? It was just a joke – we are done in two steps.

There is one note about previews here – they are generated at the moment user puts or changes image, so dont expect to generate previews for whole database with this two steps.

Thanks to AccessImagine, all you need to specify is where to keep images – and it will do all the job by itself. If you try to code external storage by your own, you will have hard times. Not worth getting in trouble with.

There is StoragePath property accessible at the design-time. After specifying it  AccessImagine will store images there while image filenames will be written to the bound database field.

Here is an example of the StoragePath property values:

• “D:\MyWork\Images”
• “\\Avenger\Incoming\Pics” – local network path, useful for centralized storage
• “Pics” – subfolder in folder, where your database file is stored
• “.” – keep images in the same folder with database file

AccessImagine tries to preserve original name of the picture – or gives some common name (like “image”, “scan”, “paste”) if it originated from the other source. Surely, component adds some numbers for duplicate filenames.

Notice: if a file is no longer needed (i. e. user put a new photo instead the old one) it will be deleted from the storage.

- Hey, I need a small contact picture, I don’t need to make a poster of it!
- How come this picture are so big if my camera is so small ? …

There is a simple way to tell AccessImagine what size of images you need – and it will donwsample violators.

There are two options at Other tab of the object inspector: MaxWidth and MaxHeight, which can limit the maximum size of the saved pictures. When user tries to save big images to the database, AccessImagine proportionally scales them down  to the specified rectangle.

You can cay: “Stop! And what’s about that nice cropping tool? If control downsamples image to a small size and after that user crops it, it will become way too small! Absolutely unacceptable!”

The good news is, control keeps in memory the full version of the image until it is submitted to database (by moving to other record or closing form). Its completely safe to crop – and you can resort to the Undo button if something has gone wrong.