Posting images and related fields in search reply

[Peter Knowles]

I have a few quirks in a search reply page that I've created, and think I know what the problem is. I just don't know how to solve it. Any ideas are welcome.

I have a database of faculty members at our school with names, email addresses, teaching schedules and photographs. I'd like to use the information in a dynamic web page setting, where students, parents, etc. could search for a teacher and get a web page showing their picture, schedule, email, etc. What I get instead are some strange results:

Anywhere the data requested is part of the designated source file, it works fine....except for the photo images. The photos are in a container field, and what is returned instead of the photo is the record number. I don't know why, but I'm wondering if/how it's possible to pull an image file from the database and post it in an HTML format page. If it can be done --and I thought it could-- I'd love to know how.

That's problem number one. the other issue is that much of the info that I want to show up on the web page is contained in fields fed by a relational setup: the teacher's first name, email address, phone extension, etc. All of those fields don't even show up on the format page when searched, and, again, I would think they should. I don't know if FMP is limited from displaying related records on a web page or not, but would like to know.

If you'd like to see what I mean, visit the search page at http://168.99.74.43:8181/chs/staff/search.htm and search for me (knowles). My first name, email address, etc. (all fed to the source DB via relationships) and my photo (from a container field) are missing.

If you're still with me, thanks for reading this much. Please advise if you have info on any of the questions above.

Thanks,

Peter Knowles

Columbia High School

White Salmon, WA 98672

[Garry Claridge]

Try placing the related fields in one, or more, Portals on the named Layout.

Is the Image coming from a related file?

Good Luck.

Garry

[Peter Knowles]

re: the images -- no, they're images inside container fields (put there using Insert / Picture from the Filemaker menubar) in the source DB file.

(and I'll try putting the related info inside portals to see if that solves that problem.)

Thanks,

Peter

[Martin Brändle]

According to experiences exchanged in the fmwebtalk list, it is not good practice to use images saved in container fields to be displayed with CDML because of performance issues. The web publishing engine has first to transform the internal image to the desired size of the web image, and in addition has to serve them to the web.

Better is to store them as static images on the web server and to reference them with an URL or image file name field within the database. You can then call them with <img src="[FMP-Field: URL-field]" ...> or with <img src="images/[FMP-Field: image-file-name]" ...>.

As an example, you might visit http://www.clicaps.ethz.ch/labormat_suche.html and click on the link "Alle Artikel anzeigen".

Martin