I have an application that currently uses another reporting tool, but we want to convert to Infragistics. The problem is that we use specialist thermal printers with this application that have a 'cutter' to separate different sections of a report. The cutter is activated by a simply sequence of ESC d, but how do we embed this into a report to enable the cutter ?
Hello,
I have been reading through your enquiry and I am not completely sure what do you need. Nevertheless the XamReportViewer that can be used to display the our Report has the standard WPF/SL key handling functionality.
Please let me know if you are facing any particular issue with it that we can look into.
Not sure what you mean by the WPF/SL key handling functionality. All I am looking to do is to be able to put an escape sequence in the footer of each report page so the cutter mechanism in the printer will cut at the end of each page.
Hello again,
Excuse me, I seem to have misunderstood you. Let me know if I have got the question this time. You need to be able to set a sort of a Label that would show “ESC d” text which your cutter would recognize as page end and cut?
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Yes, that's the basic requirement. I have tried adding an esc sequence to the text of a label but that just interprets the label as text. Ideally what I'm looking for is a way of adding the escape sequence to a label, for that label to be invisible, and have the contents of the label (text) passed directly to the printer.
Thanks for your help with this.
Hi Again,
I wave been reading through your last reply and initially I had considered suggesting the Label control, however visualizing text is the only thing it can be used for. I am still unable to understand what exactly is your requirement. We also provide an Image control for the reports, probably it will display the escape symbol you need more appropriately.
Sincerely,
Petar, MCTS
Developer Support Engineer II
Infragistics
www.infragistics.com/support
The process I am trying to achieve is to send the characters ESC then 'd' to the printer at the end of each page. I am not rying to have the characters displayed on the report.
Like all ESC sequences, printers treat these received characters as 'commands', and in this case it is to activate the cutter on the printer.
I hope the above is a clear description of my requirements. In Active Reports (your competition who we want to replace with Infragistics Reports), there is a method called 'Escape' which allows you to send escape codes to the printer during printing events such as Page End.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks
Alex Samson
Hi Alex,
In the meanwhile, another thing you can try if you use WPF or Winforms, is to subscribe to the PrintFinished event, print pages one by one, and at the PrintFinished event, send the cutter command directly to the printer by using the Windows Printing API.
Regards,Héctor
Hello Alex,
Since this functionality isn’t currently built in in our product I have sent your feature request directly to our product management team. Our product team chooses new feature requests for development based on popular feedback from our customer base. Infragistics continues to monitor application development for all of our products, so as trends appear in requested features, we can plan accordingly. Your reference number for this feature request is FR13865.
If you need any further information on this matter, please feel free to ask.
Hi Hector,
Sorry, but we ran the WPF project and it did not activate the cutter between the two messages.
The printout was :-
Before Esc d
d
After Esc d
Alex
Currently we do not support sending the escape character sequences yet. However, we are evaluating possible solutions and as part of that, we need to confirm in which scenarios the solution would be able to work.
I am attaching a sample project, which contains both SL and WPF projects that send to the printer the following text:
(Esc d escape sequence)
Can you try running the WPF and SL projects and check if the printer cuts the page between the two messages?
Thanks Petar,
It is an issue that will prevent us from moving our software to using Infragistics Reporting, as our customers rely on the cutter function to prevent having to give their customers receipts that resemble a small copy of 'War & Peace'.