Print at Home

I recently had to design our print at home ticket documents. Read this and save time. You're welcome in advance.
Print at home ticket design Basics:

• Use ctrl+x to remove a field
• If you put html in a free-text field, be sure to include the / at the end of image, br, or other tags e.g. <br /> instead of <br >.
• Always use PDF format! When html is emailed to gmail, alo, etc, the ticket gets completely destroyed! Try it, its kind of funny to see.
• always test whenever you make a change, to make sure you don't get the 'print at home error', which really could mean anything, so keep track of your changes too.
• use the export utility to backup functional ticket designs (or use the document copy feature)

Date format:
To format dates in the doc designer:

• Day name: ddd
• day number: dd or d for 03 or 3
• Month name: mmm (like Aug , Sep, Nov)
• Month Number: mm
• Year: yy or yyyy for 09 or 2009
• Hour: h or hh for 7 or 07
• minute: mm
• AM / PM: ampm

So for example you want the format
Sun Aug 3 2008 7:00 PM
use
ddd mmm d yyyy h:mm ampm
and enter this in the 'format' field when you have the event date highlighted.

Layering Images and Text:

I could not get text to appear on top of an image. the designer makes it look like you can control what appears on top of what if you have 2 fields overlapping. It appears to save the info, but when the designer is closed and re-opened, it does not save the change. In addition, i did not see a place in the database to store any ordinal information. I tried to get around this using transparent images - but - when printed from firefox, text underneath a transparent image does not show on the printed page.

Concatenating Fields:

You can concatenate fields by using
concat(@FirstName,' ',@LastName)
or concat(@fieldname1,'anytext',@fieldname2)

Barcodes:

I had the barcode width set to 300, the pah barcode width set to 300 as well, but the image still measured in at 200 pixels. If anyone figures out how to get a bigger barcode, kudos and let me know. for now, 200 pixels seems to work fine and scans fine when printed.

Printing Setup

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!