Generating images (GIF) from iViews

Question

Hi,
I am looking for a way to generate GIF images from my iView.
If I use a regular servlet as a portal component and set the response type to "image/gif", I get an empty HTML page.
Another approach would be to use a normal AbstractPortalComponent. But it seems that an AbstractPortalComponent can only produce HTML/XML/RSS.. output, but no binary format.
To include images as IResources works for static files, but not for Portal Components. Of course it would work to save my image to a file and use that, but I want to avoid that approach.
Has anybody done something like this ?
Regards,
Heiko

Answer 1

Hello Heiko,
If you want to create an image in AbstractPortalComponent you can do the following:
public void doContent(IPortalComponentRequest request, IPortalComponentResponse response){
HttpServletResponse servletResponse = request.getServletResponse(false);
servletResponse.setContentType("image/gif");
OutputStream os = servletResponse.getOutputStream();
byte[] gifbytes;
BufferedOutputStream out = null;     
          try{
               gifbytes= <get byte array of the GIF image>;
               out = new BufferedOutputStream(os);
               out.write(gifbytes);
          }finally{
               if (os!=null){
                    os.close();
basically the same approach will work with a plain servlet code.
Best Regards,
Dmitry