[FX.php List] Printing under FMSA8

[Greg Lane]

Steve,

AFAIK, there's no way to print an FMP layout without using FMP, which  
would mean another box. However, if you can recreate the content of  
the layout using PHP or other command line tools, then you could  
create a print button in your web interface that would create the  
print job on the web server box and send it to the correct printer. I  
haven't had a reason to try this before, but I don't see any reason  
why it shouldn't work.

Greg

On Apr 24, 2006, at 7:46 PM, Steve Winter wrote:

> I'm part way through migrating a large education programme from FMU  
> 6 to FMSA 8, and am finding many things much easier to  
> manage...love that you can pass parameters when you call a remote  
> script...!!!
>
> One thing that I'm currently stuck on is printing...this is how it  
> used to be in the old system;
> We had FMS running on one box, FMU on another
> The FMU box is connected to a DataCard printer. One of the FM  
> layouts has the encoding font on it to encode data onto the  
> magnetic stripe of one of a 'credit card' style plastic card, which  
> the DataCard printer produces
> The students would arrive at the programme. One of the educators  
> would use a web based form, talking to FMU to register each group  
> of students. The submission to the database of that data also ran a  
> very simple script which printed that data, and created the cards  
> for the students.
> All very nice and simple...a while the rest of the introduction  
> went on the printer would process the cards, by the time the kids  
> were ready to get started there was a nice pile of 30 cards waiting  
> for them, much excitement all round...!!
>
> The problem comes in migrating this to FM8. I still need the  
> educator to be using a web form to register the groups but FMA8 is  
> telling me that the 'print' function is not 'web compatible'...
>
> I guess I could get another FMP box, connect the printer to that,  
> open the database, then periodically run a script to check to see  
> if there were any unprinted cards and process them from there, but  
> this seems like yet another FMU license, and yet more hardware to  
> do something that used to be very simple...!
>