Reporting — Troubleshoot Report Printing Issues within the DevExpress Web Document Viewer

Reporting Team Blog
12 January 2022
I try to print a document but nothing happens!

Ever heard this complaint from a customer?

Last year we encountered an issue with Google's Chrome browser when Chromium chose to discontinue support for scripts within PDF files. We used PDF scripting to print reports, and as such, this change affected our products immediately. Our customers complained that nothing happened when they tried to print reports...

Needless to say we changed our printing logic to address the issue and took steps to protect against unanticipated changes.

  • The following Document Viewer Print dialog appears when you click Print.

  • When a document is printed, an additional dialog appears automatically, with a link to the PDF file that was sent to the printer.

As you can see, this additional dialog includes a link to a copy of the PDF file. Should a print operation fail due to an unanticipated change within the browser, your users will be able to download this PDF file and use it within another application (for instance, Adobe Acrobat Reader) for printing purposes.

Said differently, the purpose of this dialog is to mediate issues should anything go wrong when the browser sends a document to the printer.

Once we released this feature, we received a number of requests to hide this dialog. With our most recent major update (v21.2), you can disable this property at runtime and prevent the appearance of the dialog:

Even if you choose to hide this additional print dialog, please incorporate an option to restore it should the need arise. This will help reduce overall risk and allow you to troubleshoot issues should browser-related changes affect print operations in the future.

Finally – our additional dialog only appears if you print and export reports from the same browser tab as the Document Viewer. The following property should be enabled in your application:

Applications that open a new tab to print or export a report do not display this dialog.

Feedback

As always, we welcome your thoughts/feedback. Post a comment below and let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help you with your report printing needs.

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