Printing in IE mode fails to complete

[Marcus Tustin]

i have a small application running in IE mode only.  All of the users work perfectly apart from 1.  This user/PC cannot print. 

the symptom;

i select a print, the modal form showing the progress bar appears, moves about 1/2 away across then stops.... the print out never arrives.... the user has to close the modal progress form...

has anyone experienced this? and if so how did you fix it?

i feel it must be something to do with the specific user set-up as other users work just fine ... it would appear that DB downloads the print job to a temp folder on the PC, this looks like the area its failing on!?

any help/advise would be most welcome

thanks

marcus

[david horner]

You're lucky that it works for most of your users. On our test system it doesn't work for anyone :) Why don't know why and just put up with it now.

[David Knight]

Hi,
I have not seen this problem, and printing works fine. Let's cover the basics though; I assume the small asx routine installed correctly the very first time a print was requested? Generally requires administrative privileges. You can go to printers.asp in the root folder of your website & it will request installation of the routine if it's not there; or carries on to your homepage URL if it is. Therefore, you could find it on the PC, uninstall it; and force a re-install [requires Internet access, I suspect].

I do not think it goes via a temporary folder, although tbh I really do not know. All my stock-standard db report-writer reports are set to appear in the browser first [preview] and the user selects print from there. My understanding is it send html formatted text to the browser and the asx routine handles all the interaction with the visible Windows printers.

Which leads me to my suspicion: yes this is a 'local' issue with either the PC or the user logged onto the PC, especially if it works elsewhere in the same organisation. You could try some differential testing:

1. Have another user log onto the Windows PC, logon to your app and produce the same report.
2. Have the 'errant' user log onto another Windows PC, logon to your app and produce the same report.

If the problem is hardware-centric, the problem will stay with the PC. If user-centric, it will follow the user. That may shed some light.

Not sure how helpful that was?

[Marcus Tustin]

Hi All,

i have found out what was causing this ... so i am posting what i have discovered ... The user that was experiencing the issue had created a shortcut on the PC desktop.  i think they did this by grabbing the IE logo from the address bar onto the desktop while in DB.  When using this shortcut to use DB it does work but IE runs in a 'safe' mode and refuses to run some scripts. 

i have found that navigating 'normally' to the application , adding the site to the favourites and then creating a shortcut on the desktop from the favourite resolves the issue.

@David horner ... maybe this could be of help for your test system?