XLSX Export Pics

Owned by Matt Denninghoff
Last updated: Aug 16, 2023 by Jessica Tomkins
3 min read



The grid's XLSX Export feature can be used to export data from a subfile grid into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The XLSX Export Pics feature allows images to be included in the Excel document.

The grid property, "xlsx export pics", allows pictures to be included in the Excel export.

The XLSX Export Pics feature is available with Profound UI Version 5, Fix Pack 12.0 and later.

How to Include Pictures in an Excel Spreadsheet Export

A subfile grid must be setup with its data populated by the Profound UI handler. A load-all grid is better for exports than a paging grid.

An image widget must be placed inside a cell in the grid.

Either the image should be the only widget in the cell, or the image should be placed in the Designer's Elements panel above other widgets that are in the same cell:

Bind the image's "image source" property to a field. For example:

Setup an RPG program to write a URI string to the same display file field bound to the image's "image source" property. The URI should point to an image located on a machine in the same domain as the Profound UI instance. The URI can be full, such as "http://myIBMi:8080/profoundui/userdata/images/prodimg1.jpg"; or the URI can be partial, such as "/profoundui/userdata/images/prodimg1.jpg". If the URI is partial, then the image will be downloaded from the same Protocol, Domain Name, and Port as the page that is running the Profound Rich Display Session; e.g. https://myIBMi:8080.

Set the grid's "xlsx export pics" and "xlsx export" properties to true in Visual Designer.

Supported Image Formats

JPEG, GIF, PNG, and TIFF1 images can be exported from a grid and included in the Excel XLSX document.

1Support for exporting TIFF images is available in releases later than Version 6 Fix Pack 3.1

Limitations

Due to the way older versions of Internet Explorer download binary data in XMLHttpRequests, the image exports will not work in Internet Explorer versions older than 10. If a user in Internet Explorer 9 tries to download the XLSX spreadsheet from a grid with images, then the resulting spreadsheet will not include the images. (Versions of Profound UI newer than 6 Fix Pack 0.3 do not support IE8 and IE9.)

Images must be accessible from the same origin as the Profound UI instance, because images in the grid export are downloaded using XMLHttpRequests. For example, if the Profound UI instance is loaded from https://myIBMi:8080, then the images in the grid export must also be accessible from https://myIBMi:8080 .

Only one image may exist in a column and be exported in the spreadsheet.

If an image and some other text or widget is in a column, then one or the other can be exported in the spreadsheet.

Images cannot be exported from database-driven grids.