Making printing less painful using the RAS

[Craino]

Okay, we've got RAS up and running, we've converted a few of our Crystal Reports over to our website, and we've cleaned up some of the UI components. Everything looks great and runs great. I'm doing some usability testing versus our old report delivery method and printing is definitely more cumbersome.

Using RAS, when you hit the print button, it starts initiating a PDF format download. You either save or open just like any other download. If you choose open, then the report opens up in an Acrobat viewer window and you can print a nicely formatted report from there.

In our old, desktop local application, the users could simply hit a print button and the formatted report would be sent directly to their default printer.

Has anyone been successful streamlining the printing process using RAS? I'm not stuck on pdf as a given if there is an easier way out there, I'm open to hearing about it.

Thanks in advance for any info...

 

[SomeHelp]

Because DHTML does not allow for printing integration directly, Crystal chose to use PDF format. Many other tools that present data in DHTML format also use this method. I believe you can find some code on the web that would basically perform the export to PDF and then perform the print function automatically without the user having to click the print button again from the PDF window.

 

[Craino]

Thanks Somehelp - I'll start looking.

I've also found a link from another forum that I'm looking into. No discovery yet as to whether it will solve our issue, but it might be worth checking out if you are someone who is also looking for printing options. The link is a support article on the Crystal website that speaks to changing the default viewer.

http://support.crystaldecisions.com/library/kbase/articles/c2009267.asp

 

[Craino]

SomeHelp - Can't seem to locate the code you are referring to. Point me in the right direction: are you thinking it's on the Crystal website? If not, where might it be? Any help appreciated.

Thanks.