Printing large report as separate print jobs

[knitwit]

I will be printing a report that is 8,000 pages long (to date). This report has two groups in it. Is there a way to send the report at one time but get it to send as separate print jobs for each group break (already set as a page break)?

What I want to do is to staple each individual group as it prints. The Printer(copier) has a staple feature that will activate for a print job - but I don't want to staple 8,000 pages together!

Thanks for any suggestions.

technical details - Crystal 9, oracle 8i, windows 2000

 

[Isle]

8000 pages, two groups...
Even with double sided printing and equally sized groups, that is 2000 sheets of paper to staple together for each group. I am curious about What kind of printer(copier) can staple 4" of paper together? Wow!
Seriously, I think your only hope to trigger a staple event is to have lots of smaller print jobs, defined by lots of smaller reports. Unless your staple feature is sophisticated enough to auto trigger a staple event every x pages, which would be a nice feature for this type of machine (never seen this though).

 

[knitwit]

Actually the 2 group "breaks" within the report. I would only be stapling together between 3 to 20 pages. I just didn't want to break this out into the 2500 sections that will need to be stapled.

 

[IdoMillet]

Crystal alone can't do this. However, have a look at the list of 3rd-party Crystal tools at:

http://www.kenhamady.com/bookmarks.html

Among these tools, my Visual CUT software provides Print Bursting functionality via a command line argument ("Printer_Burstrinter_Name" or "Printer_Burst_Onlyrinter_Name"). These arguments were originally developed for a scenario identical to yours. Note that you will need to change your report slightly: Group Level 1 would have to change to a combination (concatanation) of Level 1 & Level 2. This would ensure that the bursting, which is limited to Level 1, occurs for what used to be Level 2.

Cheers,
- Ido

CUT, Visual CUT, and DataLink Viewer:
view, e-mail, export, burst, distribute, and schedule Crystal Reports.

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[knitwit]

Thanks for the info. After looking at other threads I realized that bursting was what I was describing. I will check out the software.