July 29, 2005 at 2:57 pm
Looking for suggestions.
We have a web applicaton that uses Reporting Services to publish reports to the web. One of the reports we are deploying are actually just labels. The problem is that we want the users to be able to export these labels to pdf or another format so that they can print to a continuous feed print environment. Has anyone tried something similar to this using Reporting Services for distributing labels for users to print?
Scratching our heads,
Ross
July 31, 2005 at 5:02 pm
Have you tried using a repeatable region and also setting the 'snaking' of your columns? If you can get the report to look like a page of labels, then the users can easily export these to PDF for printing to the label printer. Depending on your circumstances (e.g. extranet vs intranet) you could even look at using the sample Report Delivery extension that lets you straight to a printer (it's in your samples directory).
Steve.
August 2, 2005 at 10:14 am
Steve that sounds like what we will have to do. When we tried exporting to a PDF file we got the menu bar across the top which of course is not good. I got a chance to play around somemore with it yesterday and I think we may be close. I set the report up as a subscription and having a some trouble sending to the label printer. Hopefully get that solved today.
Thanks for the input.
Ross
June 14, 2006 at 11:48 am
I wouldn't recommend exporting to PDF to print labels. I've had issues where the margins have been affected during the export so it will not line up correctly on the labels. I have had success with printing from the built in web report viewer though.
I offer laser and ink jet label templates on my site (www.reportpax.com) if interested.
June 14, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Jim it looks like you have figured out a great solution. We are not currently using Reporting Services to print labels for some of the reasons that you mention on your website. We are printing them out to a pre-formated text file and reading from that. I did experiment around a few weeks ago with printing labels using Reprtoing Services and came pretty close to getting what I needed. I had planned to go back and play around with the spacing and tweeeking that a little bit, but now I won't bother. If we need to scrap our current way of doing things I'll jump on your product.
Thanks you,
Ross
February 14, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I used RS to print address labels and it worked great. Same thing applies to having page width and margins set correctly. The print preview will look like a label also. If it doesn't, it's not set up correctly. You have to set labels as the paper size in page setup with cont. feed. I also had to set Labels on my printer set up. There are a few tricks to make it work, but nothing that can't be figured out. Good luck!
February 20, 2007 at 1:59 pm
MBE, how did you get the labels to print in left/right, top/bottom order rather than top/bottom, left/right order? I tried to use the "column" feature, but wanted the output in left/right, top/bottom order.
I ended up having to make a stored proc that built one print row out of 3 data rows.
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