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Print Spooling Problems with ReportBuilder Report exported to Microsoft XPS Document Writer

edited March 2012 in General
Goof Afternoon

My setup includes ReportBuilder Version 7.03 for Delphi 7 on a Win XP machine.
We also are using TExtraDevices component for export reports to different
formats, except XPS.

We have been very happy with ReportBuilder, and recently we had a strange
situation come up. We have a user printing their reports to the Microsoft
XPS Document Writer. This part of the process worked fine; However when
the user went to print the XPS file (example a 25 page ReportBuilder report)
the print spool file became incredible large (500MB) and would take hours
to print. Within the same Delphi project we also support Crystal Reports,
we've tried a similar report and same page count and when we print the generated
XPS file the print spool file is much smaller and prints very quickly. We
cannot find what the difference is between the printing of the ReportBuilder
reports to XPS vs printing the Crystal Reports to XPS.

We first saw this issue when our customer installed our product in a terminal
server. Aparrently Terminal server uses XPS when it redirects print jobs
to the user's workstation.

Any help is appreciated.

Sincerely,

Bradley Horn

Comments

  • edited March 2012
    Hi Bradley,

    This is not a known issue. My first suggestion would be to upgrade your
    version to 7.04 and re-test (contact info@digital-metaphors.com for
    upgrade instructions). If this does not help, try downloading a trial
    copy of the latest version (14.04) and test with that. We've made some
    fairly large changes to the printing logic since 7.03.

    Best Regards,

    Nico Cizik
    Digital Metaphors
    http://www.digital-metaphors.com
  • edited March 2012
    ReportBuilder uses standard Windows API functions to render to the printer
    canvas. It is the responsibility of the printer drivers to implement the
    Windows API efficiently.

    We use the XPS printer here and do not have any issues. I recommend applying
    all of the Win XP updates (if you have not done so already) and using the
    latest available XPS driver.

    We do not have experience with Terminal Services, but have customers that
    use it successfully.
    There is a feature of Terminal Services called Easy Print, if you Google
    about 'Terminal Services Easy Print large spool files' you can find many
    references to this issue. I think this can be resolved by either updating
    Terminal Services or configuring it differently - not sure which.


    -
    Nard Moseley
    Digital Metaphors
    www.digital-metaphors.com

    Best regards,

    Nard Moseley
    Digital Metaphors
    www.digital-metaphors.com
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