Switching back & forth between printer trays

[reporting]

One of my clients has a complex CR report that needs to switch back and forth between printer trays.

The report contains Details a to Details r. The client wants to print Details b and Details i on letterhead in tray 1 of the printer. All other details sections to print on white paper in tray 2 or tray 3.

I think that a VB app to drive the program may work ... but none of us are programmers! I am wondering if subreports can be set to print to specific printer trays.

They are currently using CR 8.5 but I will be installing CE 10 in May.

Any ideas on this one?

Thanks very much,

John Marrett
Crystal Reports Trainer & Consultant

http://www.e-reporting.ca

 

[IdoMillet]

Neither Crystal nor CE offer a solution for this.

What kind of volume are we talking about? How many times per day?

One solution is to break this into 4 different reports and trigger a printout for them (one after the other) from a batch file, driving one of the 3rd-party Crystal report managers. This would allow a single point of entry for the required report parameters.

Cheers,
- Ido

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

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[reporting]

Thanks Ido. That's what I was afraid of...

This is for a regular financial report to their clients. Not sure at this point how often they want to run it ... but they have thousands of clients! So sorting the pages afterwards becomes a nightmare.

Prior to tryng to do it using CR, they used WordPerfect and merge fields. But managing that became onerous as they added info for their clients.

Three questions:
[ol]
[li]You said "One solution is to break this into 4 different reports and trigger a printout for them (one after the other) from a batch file, driving one of the 3rd-party Crystal report managers. This would allow a single point of entry for the required report parameters." Any ideas on how to get the client number into what would obviously be an incredibly complex batch file?[/li]

[li]Do you think that my idea of a VB app to drive the reports would work? I noted on the Crystal KB that they mention use of the PaperSource or CustomPaperSource properties to switch trays. Can those properties be used to switch back and forth between trays for different detail lines or are they restricted to use by the report in general?[/li]

[li]If they are restricted to use by the report in general, do you think they would they work if the different detail lines were changed into subreports in each detail line, with the subreports pointing directly to the proper tray?[/li]
[/ol]
Remember I am not a programmer ... so my questions above may make no sense at all! ;-)

Thanks very much,



John Marrett
Crystal Reports Trainer & Consultant

http://www.e-reporting.ca

 

[IdoMillet]

Hi John,

One of the 3rd-party report managers listed at:

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

has a full solution for this. It provides a command line argument (PDF_PRINT_SPLIT) that allows you to split the printing of a pdf file to multiple printer trays (according to page ranges).

You would use this report manager by scheduling the bursting of the report (in a single pass) into multiple client pdf exports. After each client export, the pdf file would be split by page range and printed from different paper trays.

In other words, the whole thing can happen with a single-line batch file triggering the single-pass processing of a report grouped by Client.

Cheers,
- Ido

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

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[reporting]

Thanks very much Ido!

There are a dozen Report Managers listed on Ken's Bookmark page. As you know these apps a lot more than I do, can you please give me a hint as to which one of those Report Managers has that "PDF_PRINT_SPLIT" command line argument?

Thanks again,

John Marrett
Crystal Reports Trainer & Consultant

http://www.e-reporting.ca

 

[vidru]

Follow the link in Ido's signature.

-dave

 

[MyComputerGuy]

My experience with programming reports may be a bit outdated but it still should work: Check into embedding the required printer command codes (PCL) into the page header or footer. Each printer/manufacturer has unique codes but the are easily found with a web search. You may need a Hex editor to create the proper escape sequence & coresponding code, save it to a file or even a field within the database or directly into the report code. This sound more difficult than it really is.

 

[reporting]

Thanks Vidru & Do!

John Marrett
Crystal Reports Trainer & Consultant

http://www.e-reporting.ca

 

[enbw]

MycomputerGuy,

Have you been able to do this in crystal 8.5?

 

[IdoMillet]

John,

Just to let you know, you had sent me an email several days ago, but my reply was rejected by your email server.

Cheers,
- Ido

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

http://www.MilletSoftware.com