futeki Posted February 16, 2008 Share Posted February 16, 2008 Designing an application that has a reporting feature -- nothing too special about that, they are full page reports, but here's my issue: Considering its' a web-based application I've ran into an idea wall. What is the best (or recommended) way to handle BULK printing through the browser? One of the reasons why the application must run through the browser besides the fact that its' SaaS is the fact that I can get rid of the OS-based problems that one encounters with developing on multiple platforms. Keep in mind, users are good at screwing things up - god bless error handling and whoever thought it up. Also one of the many variables to keep in mind is that I need to be able to stop in the middle of the batch and continue printing later, never know if a user is going to do something like run out of paper half way, or have to walk away for a little while and it stop. Any suggestions? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cunoodle2 Posted February 16, 2008 Share Posted February 16, 2008 would everyone have excel? Would it be possible to have the item parsed as a microsoft file? What about just reating a basic .txt file and then allowing the user to download the entire file directly? Have the script generate an e-mail and then attached a .txt file to the e-mail. Any of those work? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
futeki Posted February 18, 2008 Author Share Posted February 18, 2008 Firstly I want to say, thank you for your response! Well, the only problem with those suggestions are it would lose the necessary formatting. Not to divulge too much information, but I feel it would be necessary for you to understand exactly what it is I'm trying to do so here it is... Basically, I'm designing a credit reporting feature within an application. I'm not sure if you've seen exactly how a report needs to be formatted in order to be sent to a credit agency but it has a certain format, the reason this presents a problem is I'm trying to prevent the user from screwing up that format or being able to screw up an entire batch - for example, printing 4000 accounts in succession opens all sorts of issues with the user needing to take breaks, or possibly dealing with printer issues - which means I basically need to be able to stop and start this entire process easily. Obviously, putting that information into a txt file is a BAD idea for many reasons if not only for the fact it would lose its' formatting. Heck, maybe what I'm trying to do isn't even a good idea to begin with or maybe it just simply can't be done. I figured posting it here would possibly arose the interest of a master simply to show me up and teach me a thing or two Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel0 Posted February 18, 2008 Share Posted February 18, 2008 Just echo them after each other and take use of the page-break-after CSS attribute on each reports container to get one report per page. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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