GrapeCity ActiveReports Part 7: PDF and Silverlight Printer Support

ActiveReports Script 7 – PDF and Silverlight Printer Support

This is the 7th in a series of ActiveReports Blogs and is a continuation of:

Part 1 Getting StartedPart 2 Run a reportPart 3 Silverlight Viewer ToolbarPart 4 Uploading reports to Silverlight ViewerPart 5 Documentation TipsPart 6 Silverlight Viewer Theme Customization

1. ActiveReports supports native Silverlight API printing. Many find this nice, but simply put, reports are fat and could be a concern to print spoolers. We will reduce spooler size from the default Silverlight printing by using PDF Printing. Using our existing project we have developed in Parts 1-6, run the app and press the printer Icon…

2. See native print dialog for the Silverlight API and select the Microsoft XPS Document Writer…

3. Save to a folder when prompted as LargeNativeSilverlight.xps and close the browser.

4. Insert these lines in web.config in the section in <system.web>, replacing the PublicKeyToken with your own (see: C:\Windows\assembly )

5. In mainpage.xaml, add this line before the execute line to enable PDF Printing.

   public MainPage()

   {

   InitializeComponent();

   viewer1.ViewModel.PdfPrint = true;

   viewer1.ViewModel.LoadDocument.Execute(new Uri("../ActiveReport1.rpx?OutputFormat=RDF3",UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute));

   }

6. Run the App and Print. It will now show printer dialog using PDF api…

7. Print to Microsoft XPS Document Writer. When prompted, save with different file, such as SmallPDF.xps, to the same folder as above.

8. See difference in size… it is huge. In this case, it’s 4,934 KB (Silverlight) vs. 129 KB (PDF). Yikes! Pretty significant savings, huh?

In part 8 we will cover Localization Support.

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