Printing Grids


	Printing Grids

New features in version 2.1

PrintGrid user interface now available in Italian (Courtsey of Fabio Demaria)

1. Support for Cell Graphics in the Grid being printed. The visible portion of cell pictures can now be printed along with the text content. All cell picture alignments are supported.

2. Printing of a program defined selected area (irrespective of any user grid cell selection) is now possible via the API. This is intended to support the use of MsFlexgrids as interactive spreadsheets.

3. A section of text lines can now follow the page title. Lines of text can be displayed as a sub-title or as a description/introduction to the output. These lines have their own font and justification settings. This feature is not available from the user dialogue (who wants yet another tab?) but only via the API.

Minor Changes

PrintGrid now attempts to detect printers that do not support multiple copies and disables the copies option where appropriate.

Selecting to show cell background colours now works even when the grid line printing has not been selected.

Full control over the title font is now available from the user dialogue or via the API (the original API control over limited title font settings is still supported for backwards compatibility). The dialogue now displays the title using the selected font. This also cleared up a minor bug in the user dialogue.

Compressed print now supports an optional proportional compression mode that ensures that horizontal and vertical compressions are the same. This improves the presentation of compressed grids that include cell graphics.

Plus some minor improvements to the overall code efficiency.

Introduction

Grid Controls (and in particular the MsFlexGrid control of VB6) have proven themselves to be very effective for report output. But what do you do if your users still insist upon printed paper output? Some custom controls available (at a price) provide printing facilities but you can add flexible and controllable printed output to any grid.

The full source code for our grid printing solution is available for free download under the GNU Lesser Public License. So, feel free to download the code and add it to your next project or software product. Your users will love the printing facilities provided.

The design objectives:

To retain programmer control over the print options presented to the user at run time.
To allow large grids to be printed

By printing multiple pages to support the grid width as well as length
By allowing the user or programmer to elect to compress the output
By printing multiple grid sections on a single page

To print or suppress grid lines
To support merged cells and to skip hidden columns or rows
Give the user access to all available printers and stationary options
Provide support for formatted text and cell background colours
Provide support for page titles, column and row headings
Allow the user to print a selected area of the grid or selected pages from the report.
Provide support for column and cell text alignments

Well that is where it started but a lot has happened since then thanks to the ideas and code contributions of the world wide users of PrintGrid.

Why is it all on a form?

The answer is simplicity. No ActiveX DLL’s or OCX controls to worry about installing and no worries about version control. You just append the PrintGrid form to your project to gain top quality printed output for your program users. Plus - you get access to the source code so you can add your own tweaks or special facilities. A form exhibits most of the properties of a VB class although frustratingly one or two useful features are missing - now if we had the planned VB7 rather than VB.NET the holes would have been filled.

What do you have to do?

Just append the form to any project that displays data in an MsFlexgrid. You can then call the methods exposed by the form to print the grid contents. The Application Programming Interface (API) provides the programmer with almost complete control over the output layout or he or she can leave it to the user to pick the best print options from the dialogue box at run time.

The downloadable zip file contains full current documentation for the API in an RTF file but you can browse the older HTML version by clicking here or download a copy in MS Word 2000 format or read the PDF file version. This should give you a good insight into the hidden capabilities of this fantastic module.

Not Using the MsFlexgrid Control?

If you are using other grid controls or have no need to display the intended output to the user before printing it then copy the text into an invisible MsFlexgrid control placed on your form, set the API properties that suite you and call the PrintGrid method.

How to get the code

You can download the code the code for version 2.1 here Please take a look at the license if you are unfamiliar with it and remember that we retain the copyright on the code. Neither the license nor our copyright ownership should restrict your usage of the code unduly - they are intended to stop you simply repackaging the code and selling it on as a product in itself. If you do make changes or improvements to the code then you should make these changes available to others. The simplest way of achieving that end would be to pass the details back to us so we can make your enhancements available through these pages. If you come across any bugs then please let us know - we will try to fix them and post the revised code and bug list here. Please contact Mike@adit.co.uk with revisions, bugs and suggestions.

This is the final version of the VB6 PrintGrid module - allowing for bug fixes of course.

The Future

We are considering a .NET equivalent to PrintGrid. Your ideas, suggestions or code contributions are always very welcome.

	The Version 2 PrintGrid dialogue in action.