I have multiple SSRS 2008 report templates that contain embedded images and these are currently visible as expected in any report manager previews (using rendering extension HTML 4.0). However, I need these reports to be sent out as HTML e-mails.
I believe the basic/easiest technique here is to attach the images as inline base64 string to the image tags in the HTML. Is there a way to do this automatically in SSRS or alternatively what is the best practice to achieve this or similar result (i.e. images as attachments resulting in not-too-interoperable MHTML instead of pure HTML)?
The e-mail must be displayed as-is without connecting to any external storage (i.e. it's not feasible to host the images by the sender). Additionally we won't be using the SSRS itself to send the resulting HTML/e-mails so any restrictions of such nature are not of concern.
Example of the inline base64 I was thinking:
<img src="data:image/png;base64,xxxxxxxx==" alt="Some Image">