Can I store an image in a repeating section?

I am building a Nintex form that will have two panels - customer info and a (possibly) repeating section for equipment item/details. There is one customer per one or more equipment items. The user will need to upload an image attachment for each equipment item, which I think rules out being able to use a repeating section. Is there some way to use a repeating section that stores an image?

If not, I need some way to store multiple items for each customer request. I could have multiple list items:

Susie Steamboat, cost center, manager name, equipment description1, equipment location1, equipment picture1

Susie Steamboat, cost center, manager name, equipment description2, equipment location2, equipment picture2

Susie Steamboat, cost center, manager name, equipment description3, equipment location3, equipment picture3

To do this, I'd need to repopulate the first panel (customer information) so the customer doesn't have to input the same information multiple times. Can I save the customer name/cost center/etc information in a form variable or can I use the workflow to repopulate the form for another add or something like that?

I'm not sure what the least worst way to proceed is Appreciate any input.

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Thanks. My quandary is that the user needs to upload an image (an attachment) for each of their requests. I don't think the repeating section will allow an image which means I need to find some workaround. I don't need to display an image, including the one the user uploads. Trying to figure out how to set up the list in the best way to achieve this. It seems much simpler than it's turning out to be I appreciate your help.

P.S. I edited my original post to make my puzzle clearer. My wording was not.

what is intended later use of single equipments?

I would assume that you store them to the sharepoint to use/reference them in other lists or applications.

but if you store them into repeating section they will hardly be usable, definitely you will not be able to reference them with lookup fields.

I would suggest to split customers and equipments into two separate lists.

list of customers would maintain pure customer data.

list of equipments would store info about all equipments of all customers. there would be lookup field that would reference to Customers list and designate to which customer which equipment belongs.

once each equipment will be separate list item you can easily store one or more images as attachments.

Going off of what Marian has said, I agree.

You'd want to have attachments on the form where the user could upload all related photos to the equipment, and then a captioning system that would relate the relevant caption (probably the EQ number or identifier) to the proper image.

All the real work would then go into the workflow, as you'd copy out the attachments (Copy to SharePoint) to a separate document library and then use a loop to associate the captions correctly. (There is more detail on how to do that, here: -- ignore that it's about DocGen -- unless that's of interest to you, naturally.)

From there, you have a bunch of choices - you now have all of your images with captions in another library, and hopefully you also have a form identifier that pulls them all together, so they all share one piece of metadata.

It really depends on what your required output is. Can you tell us about that?

I adore these replies!! Thank you, Marian and Rhia.

The intended usage is - departments in my health system will contact the warehouse to request that equipment be stored (temporarily during remodels, for example) or surplused (stuff they no longer use that some other dept can take). The request includes the customer info (basically just who to contact and what dept it is) and a picture and info about each item they want the warehouse to come get (a desk, 5 chairs, a conference table, etc).

Okay, so it sounds like generating a document (maybe a PDF) or an email (either containing the full contents within the body, OR, attaching the PDF) is your preferred outcome?

I'm a big proponent of Document Generation (as you can see from my blog post back up in that link) but it is an additional cost.

So if you want to put it into an email, I'd do as mentioned before - copy the photos to a doc library - then use a loop with your captions to construct a block of text for your email.

So it would be like building a string - like this -

Set: vPhotoCaptionBlock

<vPhoto1>.

on the first loop, and then

Set; vPhotoCaptionBlock

on the following loops

That would then give you something that looked like:

http://fghjkl.com/photos/photo1.jpg

Here is equipment #1

http://ghjkl.com/photos/photo2.jpg

Here is another piece of equipment, #2

Then you can put that into your built email body.

I still tend to lean towards DocGen because it would be much cleaner, but, that depends on how you want to deliver the info to folks. From what I can tell though, it sounds like - correct me if I'm wrong - your different equipment may end up getting stored in separate places. By having the document library store the photos, you then also have the opportunity to follow it with specific EQ metadata - maybe spare parts information, as well - and warehousing information. If required.

your requirements are still in line with my suggestion.

you just need to create one another list - Requets- where users will will submit their demands for equipment.
then design a form for the list where user first selects a customer, then based on customer restricted list of equipments will be provided. => apply cascaded dropdowns approach to achieve this

next add a calculated value control which formula will build link to selected equipment's picture and displays it. see following blogpost how to do that https://community.nintex.com/community/build-your-own/blog/2015/08/14/populate-a-calculated-value-field-with-htmlpicture

Any luck on this? I'm attempting the same thing, well similar.

Btw - you can now put attachments into repeating sections. Which, you know, is awesome.

No. I ended up abandoning the repeating section altogether. Sorry.

We had a customer that requests to have pictures visible within the form after uploading them.

In our solution this is possible for max. 5 pictures in the format *.jpg, *.gif, *.png, *.jpeg.

My form with 5x image controls that are being hidden if not filled: