Experience with Crystal Reports printing on Dot Matrix Printer

Since few months, I was working on a project which involved migrating Cobol based ERP application to .NET. It includes writing object oriented code, creating RDBMS database and import data from old files (flat files actually) to this database. And finally generate reports and bills (in huge amount, hundreds of pages at a time)

I have been using Crystal Reports (CR) since a long time, so I decided to go for it. CR is the best tool for designing reports. Its easy and support many export formats. The most exciting thing is – it comes bundled with Visual Studio for evaluation purpose. Hence, I could evaluate it before purchasing.

So, I designed the reports and tested it on regular laser/ink jet printers – it was perfect. The formatting, printing speed and page-breaks was as expected.

In India (as per my knowledge and requirements of this application), even though we talk about e-Governance and paperless office, to submit reports to government (or to be specific RG32 report) it must be in triplicates (on different colour paper). So, laser/inkjet printers was no option and It was a costly solution. Hence, we had to depend on dot matrix printer. But, problems like – the speed of printing which was very slow, formatting which was very dark and incorrect page-breaks on continuous paper were introduced when I printed the same reports on dot matrix printer. The problem is mentioned here and here on MSDN

So, I checked many options (as listed below) from various sources (SAP Forum, MSDN Forum, other software products in same category, etc).

• I tried exporting report to given formats (Word, Excel, PDF) but the same problem of printing speed, incorrect formatting and incorrect page-breaks remained as it is – unsolved.
• Some software products used to export the report data to DOS and print from there. This wasn’t feasible for me and didn’t want to do this. Because, actually I was migrating DOS based application to Windows.
• Install correct printer drivers was one solution. So, I tried latest drivers from manufacturer as well as drivers which comes bundled within Windows. But, it wasn’t the solution. The problem was still there.
• On some forums (link here), I found out that we need to install Generic/Text printer driver. This will give option to use Draft font with Character Per Inch (CPI) size required for dot matrix printers. The report in viewer showed correctly, but on printer – the same problem.

At last, I found one solution (listed here) which exports the report to text format and print it directly. But then the code was showing error on line

ExportOptions.CreateTextFormatOptions.CharactersPerInch = 16

After searching a lot, I found (actually a reply to my question on SAP Forum) that, the version of CR which comes with VS2008 is BASIC. It doesn’t have export to text functionality (!). I’ll need to upgrade to CR2008 Full. Hence I upgraded to the full version and tested the code mentioned at this link 

And Bingo! I was able to export the raw data to text file and print it directly. And everything (font, formatting, page breaks, speed) was as expected.

There were many other issues which came into picture when I upgraded to full version of CR, like it doesn’t integrate well with VS2008. I needed SP0 of CR2008 to do this integration, then deployment of CR2008 runtime on client machines. But these issues were not of much headache and importance. These all issues are now got resolved and now my project is in testing and final data migration phase.

It is also scheduled for next version with additions of new functionalities.

When people are happy, I’m happy

I hope, this will help developers, who are interested in building applications which involves reporting and printing these reports on dot matrix printers.

Namaste

Mayur Tendulkar | www.mayurtendulkar.com