Print directly to a printer from dbFront

Question

Being able to output directly to printer would be a terrific enhancement. We print Membership Renewal Letters and Cards via Reporting Services and PDFs and whilst it works, it's tedious and to make it effective we have to do it in batch at the end of the day. If I could automatically format a Letter and and Card Layout, even if i have to generate two separate Single Row reports and then print each it would save a lot of time.
I don't know how difficult this would be, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that would appreciate this.

Comments

Hello Colin, is the issue that you need help with the template creation or is the issue that printing from dbFront requires too many steps before you get a printout?

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It's definitely an issue with too many steps. Although not proficient with HTML, I can certainly find out how to format the report(s) I need. It's the process of having to output them to a PDF and then print them offline from the PDF that's the issue. If I could just select Print > and then select from the list of installed printers on the client PC that would solve the problem.

Answer 1

As of dbFront 1.0.13 you can print directly to any server connected (network or direct) printer. If the report has all of the setting predefined (printer name, page size), then the report can be initiated with a single click.

In the meantime remote users have their printouts returned as a PDF which they can view or print themselves.

There is a separate feature request to make remote printing easier: Remote Printing to Client Printer

Comments

Thanks for this info. I wasn't aware of the apparent ease of this. I suspected that I'd need to create a PDf and then open it outside of dbFront to print. I'll certainly give this a try (it may be a while before i get around to doing this) and get back to you, but for now I'm happy to close this thread.

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I will leave the suggestion as there may be others that could benefit and reducing it to 2 clicks is not to hard and would make it 30% better..  :)