How to add a base64 signature image to a SSRS Report

There may arise an occasion where you would need to incorporate signature data into your Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Service reports.

First thing first, you would need to set up an SSRS project in Visual Studio which (Carl de Souza, 2019) nicely outlines. I’ll assume the reader is an Intermediate to Expert Analyst so we will skip through to the good stuff.

Your developed Report in Visual Studio with the configured signature cell should look like the above image. To get to there, first we need to convert the cell into an image.

Right Click the cell in question, i.e. the cell with your signature dataset or a blank cell. Then navigate to the Image Properties.

The window that pops up allows you to convert your signature data into an image.

• Give the Data a Name
• Select the image source as Database
• Create an Expression in Use this field input
• Then select the MIME type as image/png

The SSRS Expression used here is the =Replace category item, which basically replaces the DataSets field with the starting BASE64 code “data:image/png;base64” to blank.

=Replace(Fields!signature.Value, "data:image/png;base64,", "")

Once done exactly as above and there isn’t any irregularities in the data, previewing and running your report should display the corresponding image in the cell.

Solution was tested on:

Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Visual Studio 2017