The customer agreed with me that the amount of time I've spent is plenty, and I've not heard anything back from anyone else getting more than 10 reams of blank paper inserted between two lines in a Crystal Reports PDF file... hmmm did Business Objects buy one of the printer paper distributorships??

I agree that producing a PDF file and then printing that PDF file produces a very nice output, primarily because there is no header/footer text on the printout and the paging is handled a little better than file->print.

Bottom-line, the on-screen report is the end-result of the effort, NOT the PDF file. The user has to push a button to get the PDF and still file->print the PDF.

My (current) solution then became this:

• Make the "View Printable Version" button NOT visible
• Put the standard MasterPage UserControl back onto these report pages and wrap the UserControl with a div tag using a CSS class taken from this page: Printing only specific part of page
• Add a Print.css file to the project taken from this great article by Eric Meyer at A List Apart: CSS Design: Going to Print

So now the report pages can have the consistent MasterPage look without having the header appear on the printed page, but the printed reports have a uniform appearance with the background dropped out.

I'm leaving a candle in the window for a simple PDF solution, or someone that can pull my head out on the Crystal Reports issue, but until one of those happen, at least this works!

Now maybe this headache will go away...

This one is going to be mid-rant because I can't even find anyone else that has hinted at having this problem...arggghhh!

The problem:

The current problem is when a couple of my reports print, they want to print 5,572 pages which is about 5,568 too many!

I've got some pretty complex reports in some legacy packages that I support, i.e. I didn't write it, I just need to keep it running and add onto it.

The reports look fine great, but at the top of the report is a button with the text: "Printable Version". When the report is created, a PDF is created following code that I've found many many places on the web, for instance:

// Export the report to a PDF for printing
CrystalDecisions.Shared.DiskFileDestinationOptions DiskOpts;
DiskOpts = new  CrystalDecisions.Shared.DiskFileDestinationOptions();
oRpt.ExportOptions.ExportFormatType = CrystalDecisions.Shared.ExportFormatType.PortableDocFormat;


// Choose a name for the file that is unique to the session
// If you do not specify the exact path here (i.e. including
// the drive and Directory),
// then you would find your output file landing up in the
// c:\WinNT\System32 directory - atleast in case of a
// Windows 2000 System
DiskOpts.DiskFileName = getPDFFileName();

// The Reports Export Options does not have a filename property
// that can be directly set. Instead, you will have to use
// the DiskFileDestinationOptions object and set its DiskFileName
// property to the file name (including the path) of your choice.
// Then you would set the Report Export Options
// DestinationOptions property to point to the
// DiskFileDestinationOption object.
oRpt.ExportOptions.DestinationOptions = DiskOpts;

// Export the file.
oRpt.Export();

Then when the button is pressed, I do this:

// The following code writes the saved PDF file to the browser
Response.ClearContent();
Response.ClearHeaders();
Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
Response.WriteFile(getPDFFileName());
Response.Flush();
Response.Close();

// Now we delete it
System.IO.File.Delete(getPDFFileName());

Things I've tried:

• I'm loading ALL Crystal Reports assemblies local so that I know for sure, for sure that I am loading the ones I want
• I've checked to make sure, just in case, that the Crystal Reports assemblies I want are in the GAC on the server
• I've inserted extra characters and footer sections on the sections that it seems to insert the extra lines on
• I've swapped the above code out for code that streams the report instead of producing the PDF all the time since some of the "Delete" code never really deletes, and nobody cleans up after this thing on the server
• I didn't mention it, but this code is .NET 1.1 -- I am in the process of porting it all to .NET 2.0 and have a .NET 2.0 version that runs at least as far as these reports, and it produces the EXACT SAME PROBLEM!

Note I said *some* of my reports. This is an upper-level assembly report showing workorders and exceptions for a build. Some PartNumber/Serial Number combinations produce great PDF files for printing and some don't... although ALL appear fine in the browser.

Workaround:

Yes I have a workaround... and that's always good to keep the customer happy.

My workaround is to install PrimoPDF Free, and remove the "View Printable Version" button. Give a little tutorial on File->Print and printing to PrimoPDF and booya, it's done.

I seriously doubt this will be accepted as a long-term solution, and who knows, this anal-retentive place may not even allow them to install PrimoPDF, but at this point, I'm out of ideas.

I have no problem hitting the client up for a software package, but at this point, the report is fine all I want to do is print what's on the browser to a PDF... so I really don't want to install iText or any of the other options I've looked at today and begin again with laying out the flipping report...

Options, thoughts, suggestions, contributions to my Crown Royal fund...

What's a nice Silverlight fanboy like me doing in a place like this???

Stay in the 'Light!

Going through my morning paper (about 160 blogs) looking for Silverlight to distribute, and one of the sites I aggregate gave this error:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

It just struck me as funny and thought I'd share... sorta like getting slapped after you're already on the floor :)

I had trouble with someone's Silverlight site... I dropped my buddy Tim Heuer an email and asked him if it was me or what... he said it was me... sigh...

I still disagree, but as this progressed, Tim offered up that there is a problem folks are reporting that I appeared to be on the edge of... so I figured what the heck, let's help!

After an email exchange last night, we realized I needed .NET 3.5 SP1 installed.. oops... so I tried that and it pooted...hmmm

Tim says "Oh if you have VS2008 on there, you need the whole install" ... now that's where I should have heard John McLain from Die Hard: " Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs...", but I didn't.

So, I at least knew there was an order to all this and just having uninstalled all my Silverlight on Sunday night, I was a local knowledge expert on doing that, so I did it again. I then pulled down the ISO image for the full boat SP1 and promptly forgot how I've executed them in the past. So I found an exe to d/l and did that, ran it, and it was taking a long time, and it was already about 11:55pm, so I left it running and went to bed.

Got up at 5:20 this morning and the install had puked and died... yuck, yuck, yuck... it died because a log file was not created... seems like everything important happened but a log... shrug...so I went out to my MSDN subscription site and downloaded the ISO image from there, and then spent too much time remembering how to run ISO images. Cranked that up and proceeded to get ready for leaving for work.

It puked and died as well... sigh--same problem... good thing I'm a Microsoft fan boy or I could be getting pissed by this point :)

So... it was time to leave... the system appeared to be in who knows what state, certainly no Silverlight onboard, and no work accomplished last night. THAT is when the line from Die Hard came to mind... along with a couple others as well :)

So I guess tonight I'll run it yet one more time so I can send Tim a log -- didn't think to do that this morning -- then I'm going to try to clean any drek off from the aborted installs, and get Silverlight back on there... unless of course we try other attempts to get things loaded in which case anything could happen!

Gotta love it...

Breaking with a year and a half tradition, my WynApse.com site has been pretty quiet lately. I have kept up with the Silverlight Cream blog posts, but I always feel bad when I don't have much of my own product out there.

After MIX this year, Bill Reiss asked me to do a couple chapters in his book for Manning Press. It's called Hello! Silverlight 2, and I only agreed because I had read the original proposal and thought it would be a good book. Little did I know at the time that I would be involved!

Needless to say, writing a chapter of a book is a LOT more effort than putting product on your own website... no hand-waving of things, no mixed-person writing, no writing as if I'm telling a story... plus the process makes me feel like I should investigate, investigate, investigate... because I want the right information in there.

So... the first chapter has taken me just WAY too much time.

The second chapter hopefully will not because I've learned from the first plus I've put myself on a schedule of sorts.

In an effort to pump up the volume on the book and at the same time branch out a bit, at the prodding of Rod Paddock of CoDe Magazine, I applied for and have been accepted to give 3 sessions at DevTeach Montreal. That was all well and good until I saw the exalted list of folks that are ALSO going to be speaking there, and then I went totally petrified for a few minutes :)

As with most of the material on my site, I want people to leave knowing something other than that I can bang together a bunch of technologies and make it spin and dance, so I'm shooting a little lower and narrower. My first two sessions will follow the 2 chapters I'm doing in Hello! Silverlight 2: 1) Controls and local/application styling and 2) databinding. The third session will drill deeper into control modification and the whole VSM thing.

I hope to foist one or more of these on the Phoenix Silverlight User's Group as fall gears up, and also at Desert Code Camp if we have a fall edition of it.

If you're going to DevTeach, let me know and we can meet up, and you can tell me how I did!

Stay in the 'Light!