Image from string instead of a disk file

This is one of those cases where better planning in the beginning might have been a good idea.  But now we're deep in production without resources or time to go back and work out a better solution.

Our reporting mechanism looks something like:

main_program
                result = report_lab_script(some parameters)
                back to main program that processes the result

This works well for now.  But we expect to see the quantity of data increase by major quantities.

The report_lab_script, depending on the parameters handed to it, may open and use between four and nine images each time it gets called.  (It uses the "Image" routine.) That means a lot of file I/O for each page or group of pages produced in each iteration.

I'm curious if there's a way to read all of the images in the beginning of the main_program into strings and then just pass those strings to the report_lab_script so it doesn't have to do the file I/O to read the files every time.  However, "Image" seems to only take a filename.

Just grasping for straws before I end-up re-writing the world.

Appreciate any thoughts...
jack

Jack Wilkinson, Programmer
Services | VPay(r)
P: 972.367-6622
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
www.stoneeagle.com<http://www.stoneeagle.com/>
www.vpayusa.com<http://www.vpayusa.com/>

111 W. Spring Valley Rd., #100
Richardson, TX 75081

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