printing problem

[Alessandro Cavalieri]

Hi all,

My PPC application is wireless conneted with a network server, and stores
the information on a SQLServer database. After the data has been recordered
how can I launch a CrystalReport report from my PPC to a network printer?

Thanks in advance,
Alessandro

 

[Chris Tacke, eMVP]

Does Crystal have an PPC version? If not you'll have to do some wackiness
like a web service or socket listener app on the network somewhere that
starts crystal and does the printing for you.

 

[Andrew Martin]

Does Crystal have an PPC version? If not you'll have to do some wackiness
like a web service or socket listener app on the network somewhere that
starts crystal and does the printing for you.

The webservice to Crystal Reports is certainly the way to go. We did
something similary by sending datapoints to a WS tied to Excel which
generated a fancy plot and created a graphic. Shouldn't be a big step
to move on to printing from there.

-a

 

[Alessandro Cavalieri]

I know the Web Service way but I don't like installing IIS on the server PC
(because it is not so easy to install and configure and because it could be
a normal notebook and not a true server with a lot of RAM).

anyway thanks for the response.

 

[Ginny Caughey [MVP]]

Alessandro,

You can install IIS on a notebook computer too, and it really doesn't use a
lot of memory. If the notebook is running Xp then IIS is installed already
(unless it's a TabletPC). You just set it up one time and it's done. I
really think this would be the easiest way to go.

 

[Andrew Martin]

I know the Web Service way but I don't like installing IIS on the server PC
(because it is not so easy to install and configure and because it could be
a normal notebook and not a true server with a lot of RAM).

anyway thanks for the response.

When you say "Wireless connected" - do you mean you are using
activesync then? You can certainly create a file on the device and
upload it to the server via activesync. From there you have a number
of options of how to handle the new files on the server. You can
build a Windows Service or Scheduled task that picks up the new files
and imports them to Crystal reports or whatever. If you just export
your SQL CE data to an XML doc, it might be big, but it's certainly
easy to do.

If you expand on your intended architecture, we might be able to come
up with some more ideas.

-a

 

[Alessandro Cavalieri]

One of the problem using IIS is this: if you want to print using crystal
report invoked from a web service method you must have "SYSTEM" privileges
so you must change the machine.config file and modify the row username=”
machine” with username=”SYSTEM”. And this is not raccomended.

Alessandro

 

[Ginny Caughey [MVP]]

Alessandro,

I wasn't aware of this limitation of Crystal Reports. That's not nice, I
agree.