Printing problem

[Patten]

Hi,

we have developped a client-server application. Our server side is written in cobol, our client side is a thin client, running in internet explorer. We have problems when printing lists: due to limitation of time-outs, we have to return every xxx seconds from our server to our client to keep our session active: this is during preparation of printing of large lists (several 100s of pages). How can we solve this? We cannot let the server print directly to a printer because in this way we are losing the advantages of a web architecture: the client can be connected from anywhere and our server does not know which printers are connected to our client. Another solution could be probably to prepare a print file completely on the server and send it after it is ready to the client, but if it is over 100's of pages, some clients won't have enough memory to open it. Anybody having experience with such kind of problems?

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

IMHO, you would be better off letting the user instigate the report generation, then add the job to a queue and return control to the browser. The status of their job on this queue could refresh every 10 seconds, say... And when done, they would be able to either load the page in one hit, or (better still) download it as a DOC, ZIP, etc and print it off locally.

You could even give this unique style of working a name - call it a "print queue" ;o)

Dan