Open PDF File attachment in Reporting Services

Witty

I'm trying to create a report in SSRS 2008 that will link to PDF file attachments from Nav 2009. Has anyone done this before? In the past I've been able to link to a URL however NAV stores PDF's in a BLOB field and does not have a field for a URL link like other databases I've worked with. Any help would be appreciated.

thegunzo

when you say "how Nav stores attachments" are you then talking about Record Links ?

Witty

Nav stores PDF's in a BLOB field in the table [File Attachment]. However, it does not have a field for URL links inside this table. I need my users to have the ability to click on a link and open a PDF attachment if they so desire. It does not need to render inside the report it can open as a link. SSRS Image control only has the option to open JPG/GIF/PNG etc it does not have functionality for PDF's so I need to find a work around. I've found some resources to do this using ASP.Net. If anyone has another solution that would be great as I am not a developer.

thegunzo

I solved this in two steps.

First I created a web service that would deliver the attachment from the BLOB field.
Next I created an asp.net web page that used this web service and used the parameters given to select the correct attachment from NAV.

When I create the attachment I also create a link to that asp.net web page with the correct parameters and store that link in the Record Link table.

Here is a link to my Blog about this solution for NAV 2009. http://www.dynamics.is/?p=443

I have updated this solution to NAV 2013 and pure dotnet objects but have not blogged about that.