Crystal Reports 2020 Ole Object retain design size and aspect ratio

[dom65]

For many years we have used the Crystal 11.5 crviewer.dll and craxdrt.dll to allow dynamic display of images within a report in a fixed sized Ole Object. As each row was processed we read the image and resized it to maintain its aspect ratio and loaded it into the Ole Object. 

We are now looking to ship a 64bit viewer and have Crystal 2020 with the .Net Visual Studio Developer packs. It appears that you can no longer access the report engine to do row by row processing. When using the Report design tool you are able to set the Graphic Location to one of the data source columns and then select the Respect Scaling option in the Display method. This forces Can Grow to be turned on which means that the Ole object will grow to the actual image size.

We deal with art galleries and museums and they tend to have single page reports which an image at the top and related data at the bottom. With the Can Grow option set this is not possible.

How am I able to either get access to the report engine to replicate the existing functionality that we have or how am I able to achieve this using the Crystal 2020 Ole Object? i.e how can variable sized images be displayed in a fixed size Ole Object with their correct aspect ratio maintained? 

[ido_millet · Accepted solution]

You can do this using a UFL (User Function Library). You can create your own or use an existing one.

Ken Hamady maintains a list of 3rd-party UFLs here.  
At least one of these UFLs provide functions for resizing & cropping images on-the-fly.

[dom65 · Accepted solution]

Thank you for the suggestion. I'll look into this further.