Pull graphics from web site

Is it possible to pull graphics from a client web site.

Danny

Hello Danny,

 

FusionPro VDP products support local paths (c:\images\image.jpg), relative paths to the template (.\images\image.jpg), and UNC paths to local servers (\\imageServer\images\image.jpg). However, it does not currently support http URL paths (http://www.site.com/images/image.jpg).

 

Is it possible to pre-download the images you need and then work with them as local files relative to the FusionPro VDP software?

Mark, has anything changed since this subject thread was opened? Is FP still incapable of loading images via http? We have a service running, that can return an image from our database as a response to a GET request. Or possibly there is a FP method to access resources using SQL?

 

I am aware we could write a script that would periodically dump images to the disk and thus make them accessible via local or UNC path, but it brings up a bunch of issues we would like to avoid.

Mark, has anything changed since this subject thread was opened? Is FP still incapable of loading images via http? We have a service running, that can return an image from our database as a response to a GET request. Or possibly there is a FP method to access resources using SQL?

 

I am aware we could write a script that would periodically dump images to the disk and thus make them accessible via local or UNC path, but it brings up a bunch of issues we would like to avoid.

There is currently no mechanism built into FusionPro for retrieving resources via an arbitrary HTTP request, nor is there any way to retrieve images from a database which are not already resident on the file system. We do download images via HTTP as part of our Personalized Image Web Service solution, and we offer an Image Repository solution which allows information about graphics to be cached and retrieved from a database, but these are not generalized.

 

You can always contact Sales to inquire about custom engineering work to integrate FusionPro with your Web Service.

Would it be useful to you to be able to simply specify a URL starting with "http://" instead of a file system path? Or do you need a way to make a call into a Web Service method? (The first one is probably doable with minimal interface changes; the second is more complicated.)

Dan, implementing a way for FP Server to make a http call would meet our needs.

 

A.

This feature has been added to FusionPro 7.1, via the CreateResource function:

http://forums.printable.com/showthread.php?p=6226#post6226

 

You can use it like so, in FusionPro Desktop, Designer, Direct, and Server, in a Graphic rule:

return CreateResource("http://www.printable.com/uploads/Workflow/FusionProDesktop.jpg");

A few notes: The existence of the file at the specified URL is not verified at rule validation time (in the Rule Editor dialog); the file is downloaded only at composition time, or an error is generated if the download fails. Downloads are cached within a given composition, but are not cached between subsequent compositions. Only URLs beginning with "http://" are supported.

Thank you.