Question

Given a SSRS report definition file with an embedded image in it, just wondering if its possible to extract that image XML to recreate the original image file.

e.g. :

inside the rdlc file, you might see xml like this :

<EmbeddedImage Name="tick">
  <MIMEType>image/bmp</MIMEType>
  <ImageData>Qk1mAwAAAAAAADYAAAAoAAAAEAAAABEAAAABABgA ... <<REST OF IMAGE HERE>>
  </ImageData>
</EmbeddedImage>

Is it possible to take the ImageData, and transform form it in some way to re-create the original image bitmap byte stream ?

(This might be useful in cases such as when you’ve lost the original image file on which the embedded image was based.)

Answer 1

Two approaches are detailed in this blog post:

1. Copy the encoded image from one report to another if you need to reuse it there.
2. Export a copy of the report to Excel and copy the image from the spreadsheet.

Or if you need access to the image more directly, I found this utility that will parse the XML and load and export the images. Looks like source code is available.