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.
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,
Thank you very much for the detailed description, I do understand what you have in mind. I am not aware of such a functionality, this is why I am going to forward your question to our development team and get back to you with a more accurate response.
Thank you for your patience and understanding while resolving your issue.
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'.
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:
Before Esc d
(Esc d escape sequence)
After Esc d
Can you try running the WPF and SL projects and check if the printer cuts the page between the two messages?
Regards,Héctor
Hi Hector,
Sorry, but we ran the WPF project and it did not activate the cutter between the two messages.
The printout was :-
d
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.
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.