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c#crystal-reportsstring-formatting
manav inder
manav inder

Reputation: 3601

String Manipulation in C#

I am working on c# .net application, and using crystal reports. I need to print crystal reports on dot matrix printer, but speed of printing is very slow as crystal reports prints in graphical mode. So i moves to dos based printing and use RawPrinter helper class to print it. That works completly fine.

But writing a dataset to a text file(in invoice report format), uses lots of string manipulation for positioning the characters, spacing etc. I use string builder class and padding and lots of if, else to print page totals, grand totals, taxes etc.

Writing a text file in this way is such a pain.

Please suggest me some other feasible and effective approach.

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 609

Answers (4)

Vijay Gill
Vijay Gill

Reputation: 1518

I had a similar issue and changing printers was not a solution because of 1800 or so clients using dot matrix printers. So solution I came up with was to use a templating engine (StringTemplate http://www.stringtemplate.org/), get the output text file and send it to the printer.

Upvotes: 1

marinara
marinara

Reputation: 538

use tabs for everything. it will let you put stuff in tab columns automatically.

Upvotes: 0

Ian Ringrose
Ian Ringrose

Reputation: 51927

You need some sort of templateing engine, but as you are not doing HTML you need the engine to be stand-alone. See C# template engine for some options.

XSLT is a good option if you like XML and already know how to use it, otherwise I would tend to code with a more "code focused" solution.

Upvotes: 1

Oded
Oded

Reputation: 499172

You can export the dataset to XML (DataSet.WriteXml) and transform it to another textual format using XSLT.

Upvotes: 2

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