Re: Printing from a browser in a web application
Re: Printing from a browser in a web application
- Subject: Re: Printing from a browser in a web application
- From: Nathan Hampton <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 22:54:08 -0500
On 22 Apr 2004, at 1:22 PM, Mark W. Shead wrote:
We have an application that uses LPR to print barcodes back to the
client. When the client requests a bar code from their browser, the
server sends a print job back to their ip address using LPR. This
works very well, but we now need to add some clients who will be
behind a nat firewall. The server will only be able to communicated
with them using responses to HTTP requests.
Depending on precisely what the situation is, you might be able to
configure the NAT firewall to connect certain ports to certain local IP
addresses. For example, my NAT firewall can be set so that requests to
<firewall.IP.address>:200 are sent to 192.168.254.200. If you use
static local IP addresses (or set DHCP leases to never expire), this
might let you send your LPR jobs through.
The application is a checkin system for church nursery's so it is
important to suppress print dialog boxes that may be generated by the
browser.
I think we can create a solution using VBScript that will work with
Windows. Are there any other ways to handle printing through the
browser that don't depend on having a windows operating system?
(I'm going to hate myself in the morning for suggesting this, but...)
Is it important to completely suppress the dialog boxes, or do you just
want to relieve the user of the hassle of dealing with them? If it's
the latter, you might (emphasis on the 'might') be able to use {winces}
JavaScript {cringes} to have the browser print and automatically
dismiss the dialog box. Of course, this relies on the browser's
JavaScript implementation, which is even worse than relying on the OS.
If IPP won't work, you may be better off with the VBScript option --
and that's coming from Mr. Platform Independent himself. Even so, the
good news is that you could do something similar with AppleScript (or,
presumably, with UNIX-style shell scripts), so you might be able to
avoid the painting-yourself-into-a-corner trap by simultaneously
painting yourself into several corners -- a nice trick, if you can pull
it off. :)
--NCH
PS: If -- scratch that; WHEN you do come up with something, please let
me know. I'm going to be in a similar situation fairly soon, though
avoiding the print dialog isn't as pressing for me.
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