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InfoQ Homepage News FlexReport For Printing In Adobe Flex

FlexReport For Printing In Adobe Flex

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Rob Rusher, a Flex developer and enthusiast, points us to FlexReport. Poor printing support in Flash is a common problem for Flex applications.
It doesn't matter where I go, I always run into people having printing issues with Flex. Most have found the FlexPrintJob class and samples on how to use it, but for those who print multiple pages the results are sometime less than stellar.

I just found a new open source project called FlexReport. It is said to address report layouts, multi-page reports and print preview.
FlexReport is released under the LGPL license and available at RIAForge. The API features include: Report Layout support, Multi-page content, and Print preview.
  1. Report layout: in order to print a page in Flex you need to create a container and add it to a FlexPrintJob. Not a big issue when working with static content. But when creating dynamic reports where you don’t know how many pages you’ll have this process can quickly become a nightmare.
  2. Multi-page content: The only component specifically designed for printing is PrintDataGrid. There’s no support for text or images.
  3. Print preview: as I said before organizations need printing. But a thing they don’t need is wasting paper. There’s no way to make a print-preview with PrintJob. And no one likes printing 100 pages of a table, just to realize they are printing the wrong data.
You can checkout the demo application at: http://www.kemelyon.com/flexreport/. Also, you can read more on the project blog.

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