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Asked: 2026-05-14T00:17:16+00:00

I am re-engineering a windows application to be ported to web. One area that

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I am re-engineering a windows application to be ported to web. One area that has been worrying is ‘printing’.

The application is data intensive and complex reports need to be generated. The erstwhile windows application takes advantage of printer APIs and extends sophisticated control to the users. It supports functions like page break, avoiding printing on printed parts of the sheet (like letterhead), choice of layouts and orientation, etc. Please note that these setting are not done only while printing, they are part of report definition sometimes.

From what I know, we cannot have this kind of control while printing web pages. I am in a process of identifying options at my disposal. While I prefer to first look into something that will help me print from raw web pages, following are other thoughts:

  1. Since reports can also be exported to .xls & .pdf versions, let user download one and print directly. This however limits my solution to the area of application that have export feature.
  2. Use Silverlight (4.0) for report layout definition and print. I think Silverlight 4.0 (in beta right now) provides adequate control over the printer. I have so far been avoiding the need of any RIA plugin.
  3. Meticulously generate reports on web with fixed dimensions. I am not sure how far this will go.

Please share practices that can be applied easily in my scenario.

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  1. Editorial Team

    For reporting in the past on the web, using .NET, I like to generate PDF, Excel, Word or CSV files. I really like iTextSharp which allows for creating of PDF’s.

    Word can accept HTML, so that is usually quote easy. For more control you can get into the Word interops http://nishantrana.wordpress.com/2007/11/03/creating-word-document-using-c/, but they left me frustrated. Not for implementation, but I felt the clean up was poor.

    CSV are great for raw data dumps and that is it.

    For HTML, you can get nice control using a style sheet targeted to print media. There are just certain things you cannot control, like browser header and footer.

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