Access an Asset File in beforeRender

gtourkas

Hello,

We have a set of JSON files in __appDirectory holding report settings and rarely-changing data. One of these files (selected via a req.data property) is read via a custom script's beforeRender that attaches its parsed contents to req.data.

We would like to maintain these files as assets in studio. Is there a way to access and read an asset in beforeRender ?

Thank you.

jan_blaha

It is a bit hidden in the assets docs

But you can add a code like this to the script

var data = "{#asset vardata.txt @encoding=string}"

and it will get replaced by assets extension

gtourkas

Hello Jan,

Thank you for your response.

I've noticed that as well but it is not always vardata.txt. It can be vardata1.txt or vardata2.txt. And 1 and 2 are properties or the request.

jan_blaha

Ah ok. Unfortunately the assets replacement is static and processed before the script is executed. So there is no way to make it dynamic as you require.
I've created github task to give it some thoughts.

The solutions which you can evaluate now:

Load all assets you need into script and choose based on your input dynamically afterwards
Use REST based http request from the script to fetch the asset you need. Something like

require('request').get(`http://localhost:5488/odata/assets?$filter=name eq '${req.data.par}'`)...

Write few lines of [custom extension(https://jsreport.net/learn/custom-extension)