Printing issues

[Russ]

To ASP.NET printing experts:

My Asp.net web form needs to print some reports at the client side.
I've been trying to research this and find some confusing and
conflicting information in previous news group answers. Some say
"Crystal Reports", others say "PDF" or "Word", and others say that you
cannot do this at all on client side???

My reports are text documents that are already formatted, contain form
feeds, and positioning controls specifically for certain HP printers.
The users will have the correct printer so that is not a problem. My
issues are:

1. Need to display a page showing reports available and allow user to
select to print one or more of them.

2. Must not require to display the actual report in a web page prior
to printing.

3. Need some way to specify which client side printer the report will
be sent to (in cases where client has multiple printers).

All clients will be running latest version of IE, so compatibility is
not a problem.

From what I have read, IE does not have capability to handle the above
in any straight forward way. Please confirm this.

My thoughts are something along the lines of developing a plug-in for
IE which can handle the printing as I require, and distribute the plug
in to the clients. Is this feasible, and if so can anyone point me to
some documentation or sample code that will help me figure out how to
do this? Or can anyone suggest an alternative way? I have no
experience in programming for IE, but I have written Active X controls
in VC++. My Web forms are written in C#.

Thanks much for your insight.

Russ

 

[Kevin Spencer]

Hi Russ,

First, your reports are NOT text documents (text documents contain ONLY
text), but that isn't really an issue.

Second, you will definitely need to write an ActiveX control or similar
client-side executable to do what you want. The browser is designed to print
a certain way, and that includes displaying the document. The browser can't
print it if it isn't loaded into the browser, which means viewable.

--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
..Net Developer
Microsoft MVP
Big things are made up
of lots of little things.

 

[Russ]

Hi Russ,

First, your reports are NOT text documents (text documents contain ONLY
text), but that isn't really an issue.

Second, you will definitely need to write an ActiveX control or similar
client-side executable to do what you want. The browser is designed to print
a certain way, and that includes displaying the document. The browser can't
print it if it isn't loaded into the browser, which means viewable.

Thanks for the reply Kevin, but I beg to differ with you about Text.
Here is a small sample:

*p180x180YAre your Checks and Reports accurate?*p180x280YAre your Deliveries made on time?

This is clearly text in my book; it's certainly not binary data. The
only non-printing character is the escape char which is shown as a
black box. You might argue that makes it not text. But escape
characters are used all the time in text documents.

Anyway, thanks for veryfying my thoughts on what I will need to do.
And I know that I will need to find an IE newsgroup to ask questions
about writing a control for it. But I also need to know how the
interaction between my web form client code (C# code behind), and the
IE plug-in will work - or will not work...

So, my question remains - can anyone here provide some information on
how to proceed, or supply references to documentation or code
examples?

Thanks, Russ

 

[bruce barker]

you will have to write an active/x control.

the control should do everything, display the list ui (this could be passed
as parameters on the page), handle selecting the printer, and download the
selected files and printing them.

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

 

[Russ]

Thank you Bruce. Now I need to learn how to integrate my control with
IE. A quick look at the Visual Studio help file contents last night
did not turn up anything that looked helpful. Guess it is time for a
google search.

Thanks again, Russ