I’m working on converting a system to Perspective that includes several statistics reporting screens. In the existing, these screens can be printed to get a hard copy of the report. It seemed like creating these screens using the Reports module and showing them with Perspective’s Report Viewer component would give that functionality; the documentation describes Report Viewer as providing “an easy way to view and print reports in a Perspective View”.
But having created a report and a Perspective page to view it, I can’t find any way to actually print the report. The closest I can get is downloading it as a pdf, which the user can then (presumably) print however they want. (I’m also exploring just recreating the report layout on a normal Perspective screen and using the browser’s built in print function, but this is more complicated for the user, and the output isn’t that great.)
Is there a way to print a report on demand from the Perspective Report Viewer? Am I missing something, or is downloading a pdf the best I can do?
Any insight is appreciated.
Downloading the PDF is the best you can do in a browser-based environment. Most modern browsers with show them in a tab with appropriate UI for user-triggered printing.
Your other option is to configure one or more network printers on the gateway and print to those.
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Thanks, I had a feeling that’s how it was. Just wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing something obvious.
Actually, system.perspective.download() tells the browser to save the file, not open in a tab. You might want to consider storing your PDFs in your database so you can access them by URL (via my free Blob Server module or via WebDev). That will trigger your browser’s PDF UI.