Truly Printer-Friendly Reports

Pizzor2000

Pizzor2000

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Jul 12, 2004
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I have an ASP.Net 1 application, which includes database-driven electronic paperwork. The paperwork is entered into the system within this site, and users can view and print the notes online.

Right now, the printable reports are simply ASP.Net forms--the background code queries the database for the form, and echoes the results onto ASP Labels.

Being HTML-based reports, however, they do not always look good when printed--its hard to get the page breaks correct, different users have different browsers, font settings, etc., and some forms have more lines of data entered in some text fields. As a result, some of the forms have the last few lines of data on top of an otherwise blank page.

What are some options for generating a clean printout from an ASP.Net application, such as writing out to a PDF template?
 
I normally take a look toward Crystal Decision which is included in some version of Visual Studio 2003.

Otherwise, you could look toward generating PDF report. Those, once generated, will ALWAYS be printer friendly.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Arch4ngel said:
I normally take a look toward Crystal Decision which is included in some version of Visual Studio 2003.

Otherwise, you could look toward generating PDF report. Those, once generated, will ALWAYS be printer friendly.
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Do you have any suggestions for a solution to generate PDFs? Do you have any sample source code for either of these methods?
 
Basically, PDF are just text with commands and everything but its kinda hard to put togheter and generate one like that (really complicated specifications).

What we use here is a PDF Printer. Once its printed, we can share it to everyone. I know there is also many differents tool to do the job. But here we use this PDF printer or the Crystal Decision coming with our version of VS2003.

Sadly, I dont have any code under hand to help you out.
 
My colleague and I did search for some .Net examples for writing out to PDF. We found some examples which write out basic text and tables to a blank PDF, but we need a way to use a template for the form and write the results onto the appropriate place.

I assume Crystal Decision could spit out data onto a pre-built report. I am familiar with Crystal Reports, just not Decision.
 
Its basically the same thing but with some strip out features.

You might look online how to make reports out of it. Really nice and easy.
 
As an alternative, CSS allow you to specify where page breaks occur, width of boxes of data, etc. You can of coarse specify this stuff for print only rather that screen. If you dont want to spend a small fortune on a package such as SRS or Crystal, spend $20 on a good CSS book (such as DHMTL and CSS for WWW), and use CSS to do all your printing. Dont by a Ferrari if all you need is a Toyota.
 
Or if you are on a budget look at XSLT as a way of formatting the output. XSL-FO is a common mid-ground that you can then get various tools to transform into PDF (amongst many other formats).
 
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