Working With Images

The presentation template designer allows you to add images to customize your presentation template, for example, a company logo or a graphical representation of the item type. Images are added by entering a URL or Web address. You can reference image files that are in GIF, JPEG, or PNG format.

Images can be added to any cell in the grid by dragging the image tool

to the target cell. You then type the URL or Web address for the target image, and it displays in the presentation template.

A good location for a logo or graphical representation of the item type is in the template header grid, aligned to the right or left edge.

If you use the Windchill RV&S server to store the required images, the image files are made available to your template from the following directory:

where installdir is the path to the directory where you installed the Windchill RV&S server.

Using an URL address, you can also access images on any public HTML server.

Image files copied to the web directory are not backed up and must be restored manually. Therefore, it is important to retain copies of your required image files.

If you are using Windchill RV&S’s Federated Server Architecture, The client connecting to a proxy server can view Item Presentation Template (IPT) images residing on the main Windchill RV&S server or a network location that is inaccessible by clients, due to network restrictions, such as a firewall. To transfer IPT images across the firewall, images are cached on the proxy server and Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) calls are performed between the client, proxy server, and main server.

When a client initially displays a specific item type, the proxy server caches the IPT images and subsequent requests from other clients receive the images from the proxy server's cache.

If the proxy server cannot retrieve an image, the client displays the IPT; however, a broken icon image displays for the image the proxy server could not retrieve.

If an IPT image changes on the main server, the proxy server replaces the old image in the cache with the new image. After restarting the client and viewing the item type, the client receives the new image from the proxy server’s cache.

You can view and re-position all existing images in the IPT regardless of accessibility to the images. However, you can only add new images you have access to. For example, if you attempt to add an image that resides behind a firewall, the Windchill RV&S Administration Client displays an error message that the specified image cannot be found.