Printing from a webservice

Question

Hi I was wondering if anyone had tried printing from a webservice without the use of forms. Im trying to create a webservice that when called from a remote browser will print to the computers default printer. I have found many resources for printing but they all use forms. Any help/guidance is much apprieciated.

nathanr · Answer

Any more thoughts on this?? Thanks

nathanr · Answer

Im thinking I need to do something to the PrintPageEventArgs argument that is passed into the print event handler. Dont I have to manually set up some page info in this situation? Thanks for the help.

james · Answer

Yeah Printing is part of Windows.Forms but that doesn't prohibit you from printing without a UI. You are on the right track just keep working with it and you will get it. -James

nathanr · Answer

James Thanks again for the reply. I thought it would be fairly simple to. Mabey it is and im doing something wrong. It seems to me like you need some form to call the C# print functionality but I dont want to use forms because this is a webservice. In my code it seems to choke when pd.print() is called. Here is what I have so far: Any comments/suggestions/thrashings is much apprieciated. using System; using System.Collections; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Web; using System.Web.Services; using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Printing; using System.IO; using System.Windows.Forms; namespace LabelPrintSvc { /// /// Summary description for Service1. /// public class Service1 : System.Web.Services.WebService { public Service1() { //CODEGEN: This call is required by the ASP.NET Web Services Designer InitializeComponent(); } PrintDocument pd = new PrintDocument(); [WebMethod] public string printIt() { pd.PrinterSettings.PrinterName = @\printer / netprinter; pd.PrintPage += new PrintPageEventHandler(printItHandler); if (pd.PrinterSettings.IsValid) { pd.Print(); return printing worked; } return Printing failed; } private void printItHandler(Object sender  PrintPageEventArgs e) { String textToPrint = .NET Printing is easy; Font printFont = new Font(Courier New 12); int leftMargin = e.MarginBounds.Left; int topMargin = e.MarginBounds.Top; e.Graphics.DrawString(textToPrint printFont Brushes.Black leftMargin topMargin); } } }

james · Answer

Sure in that case its fairly simple take one of those printing examples you saw and create your printing class. Then just make a method public and give it the [WebMethod] attribute. That should allow you to trigger your printing simply by calling the web method. -James

nathanr · Answer

James Thanks for the reply. I am wanting to print from the webserver itself or on a network printer connected to the webservers network. I would like to make it so there is nothing for the client to do other than access the webservice and send it two parameters to print. Any ideas?? Thanks in advance

james · Answer

Are you wanting to send something to a printer on the Web Server itself or are you wanting to print to the client machine that is accessing it? If its the client machine you want to print to security will prevent you from doing client-side printing. There are ways around it but its usually not a good idea to force a print rather than letting the client machine handle it.