Printing in the background and return control to application

rbuser

We have over 160 reports in our application and many of them take 5+ minutes
to generate/print and most in the 30 to 1 minute range. My customer just
asked me if there was anyway enable background printing so that once they
hit the print button they can return to doing their job and not wait 5+
minutes for the report to run. We are using version 7.03 Pro, Delphi 7
Enterprise, Textra Devices, DOA, and using an Oracle 9i Database

To run a report, the user selects the report off a menu, a "filter" form
opens, they select the appropriate filter criteria, and then they click a
print button. Based on a radio button selection, the report is either
previewed or the print dialog appears and they can send the report directly
to the printer. This is when the problem arises, after they select to print
directly and then click ok on the print dialog, they have to wait while the
data is retrieved, formatted, and then sent onto the printer before they get
control of the application. Many of the users are data entry/data analysts
that input data, need to print a report, and then get back to entering data.
If they can enter 2 records a minute, have to print a report after each
insert which takes 1 minute to generate and print, we end up with them
entering one record every 90 secs instead of one record every 30 secs. Over
the course of a day, this is a significant impact on their productivity.

So, is there any way to set up the report so that the "Report.Print;"
command executes and control is returned immediately to the user.

Thanks
Richard Anderson

nicocizik

Hi Richard,

Yes, there was a Background printing feature added to ReportBuilder after
version 7.02. You can enable background printing by accessing the
BackgroundPrintSettings from the report object. For more information on how
to set up and use the background printing feature, please see the
ReportBuilder help under the topic TppProducer.BackgroundPrintSettings.

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