I would like our customers to be able to print records by using a print friendly button when in Webpublisher.

We use the @media stylesheet setting to include and exclude page elements. (See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/media.html)

For an example take a look at http://v2w.andornot.com/html/english/research_development/area.asp - click on any of the See Projects links (which are all canned searches)to view some records. Choose File > Print Preview and note how the left navigation column is omitted, the image is smaller etc.

This method means you can use the same form rather than creating an additional one especially for printing. However it would also be nice to have the ability to specify the Change Form parameter as a hyperlink, or a hyperlinked printer image within a report.

Kathy

Andornot Consulting Inc.
Inmagic Partner
Toll free: 1-866-266-2525
Email: info@andornot.com
Website: www.andornot.com

Hi,
we took a slightly different track (since we started with WP HTML reports and couldn't rely on CSS2 support at the time), and generated two different reports for each report (now that makes sense...).

One report was used for displaying in the browser, the other for printing. To keep things simple, the user had to select which records to print, then I used a semi-canned query to launch the print report, which automatically envoked the print() event, then goes back to the original report.

Most users don't even notice that their browser changes page and goes back again. They just see the print dialog.

It's not pretty and a pain to maintain, but at the time CSS2 couldn't be relied on (hey, it was IE4 for most of our users!).

These days we use XML/XSL based output, but have kept the two separate report formats. I really should look at combining them using CSS2, but it's all about time...

What would be great is if the paging could also be CSS dependant... so that a report displayed in the browser is paged, while a report to the printer is page flowed, but not limited to "MR" records.

Hmm... that's probably just an XSL/CSS2 issue... most look into it one day.... but I rant....

Later'ish
Craig