Printing

[lawingo]

I am curious what everyone is using for their VLF printing solutions. We have integrated Crystal Reports into pretty much everything we do and currently its what we use to deliver any kind of report to our VLF users. However, the version we are using (XI) is no longer supported and we have run into some issues where a Windows Update cripples the ability to export Reports. To fix this we have to uninstall the update and turn off Windows Update - something the Boss isn't thrilled about.

So with that - what is everyone else using?

Thanks
Chad
Sherrill Furniture Company

[atostaine]

Crystal reports add's a lot of functionality that would be difficult to rewrite, no?

We've done the following...Not sure any one of them is the best.

If you are connected to IBM i, RPG to spool files or PDF's. Query and other tools on i.
Write HTML and popup the report. Throw in a CSS and you can get pretty powerful.
Write PDF using activex or other tools.
Write to MS-Word with ActiveX, can use templates and bookmarks. We've done some very nice looking contracts and forms that used to be pre-printed.
XML? Word can interpret this also.

[atostaine]

Here is a two part article on using HTML/CSS, etc. to provide "printed" output to users.

The author is Nathan Andelin. He's a frequent poster on midrange.com's mailing lists and well respected by the midrange community.

https://rd.radile.com/rdweb/info2/ibmiui13.html

https://rd.radile.com/rdweb/info2/ibmiui14.html

His code to populate the reports is RPG but it uses SQ I/OL and could be ported to LANSA.

[praposo]

I have been using BIRT to generate PDFs in our web applications. http://www.eclipse.org/birt/