I'm bored. Lets talk about printing.
I will explain my printing setup, and maybe it will help yours.
When PE prints a ticket, here is what is going on:
PE locks the ticket, so that no-one else can print during the process
A record is prepared and inserted into a print-spool table in the database.
The tix_printserver.exe application queries this table every x seconds to look for pending tickets.
When it gets a ticket, the tix_printserver.exe sends the ticket to the printer.
If successful, the tix server will mark the tik as printed, and unlock the ticket for printing by others.
The computer that runs the boca printer driver spools the ticket for printing, and then it prints.
So, I have found that it is best to have the tix_printserver running on the database-server for a couple of reasons: 1; Someone has to be logged in for tix-print to run (it can't run as a service), so leave a login open on the db-server for this kind of process (the pc-charge payment server has the same circumstance. I use the same open-login for print servers andpccharge). 2: since the app is querying the db every 5 seconds, it will ease network traffic to have the app running on the db server.
The Boca printers themselves I have hooked up to HP printer hubs. Network connection on one end, paralell on the other. Use the HP jet-admin utility to configure. You assign a tcp/port number to "create" a tcp printing port on the server.
The PE application assigns printers according to sales point. every sp gets a main and alternate printer. There is a user-option to "print to alternate", which will print to the alternate for that salespoint.
If you run into the problem of a botched batch of tickets, you must unlock the printing transaction so someone else can print the tickets. there is a utility in PE admin for this.
Thats all I have for now.
Don't ask me how to print reciepts that you can't print otherwise, cause I won't tell you till next week.
Till next time, happy PEing!
2 comments:
Is it possible to have 2 different ticket designs? Asking because we have 2 parallel BOCA and just got shipped a USB boca that will not print using our in-place design. 2 separate calls to Blackbaud have said yes we can have 2 designs and no we can't have 2 designs.... HELP???
is the usb boca a different layout, dpi, or fgl language version than the parallel? If so, the same document may look different on the 2 printer types. PE does support different printer types, so that a document can have different versions for different printers, but I don't know how this would work for 2 different types of boca...
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