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Flex2Crystal 3.1 Adds .NET Print Engine Support for Crystal Reports

Picture of Oliver Nelson Oliver Nelson : Mar 10, 2017 4:00:00 AM

Crystal Reports

The latest version of Flex2Crystal, v3.1, has been released and is available for immediate download. In addition to fixing a DataFlex Studio detection bug, this release adds a significant new feature that will help developers handle a wider variety of printers through their Crystal Reports.

What's New in Flex2Crystal 3.1?

1. Detecting DataFlex Studio 18.0 and later:

Starting with DataFlex 18.0, some product names in DataFlex affected our ability to detect the DataFlex Studio installed on the system during Flex2Crystal installation. That has been addressed in this release.

2. Added support for printing using .NET Print Classes:

Over the years, as more companies have adopted Flex2Crystal, we've seen an increase in the number of issues related to properly detecting printers and printer features. Flex2Crystal has always exposed the native Crystal Reports print engine as-is. But even early on, due to issues we experienced in-house with this print engine, we decided to build a secondary print engine into Flex2Crystal as a backup for the primary print engine. Due to number of bugs that have cropped up in recent months, we've now decided to enable the secondary print engine as an optional feature.

How does the .NET-based print engine work?

This new print engine is based on the .NET System.Drawing.Printing classes. Our goal in enabling this new print system is twofold: 1) Fix the printing issues that our users are experiencing and 2) keep broad compatibility with existing code. In that vein, we've made the new print system a simple property that you can turn off and on with a single line of code:

Set pbUseNewPrintSystem to True

This property, which you set in your cFlex2Crystal class/object, will enable the new print engine without requiring any other changes to your code OR any new Flex2Crystal runtime! If you're already using Flex2Crystal 3.0, simply install the new developer version which includes the package changes required to use this new print engine. There is no need to install this new release at your customer's site. If they're already running Flex2Crystal 3.0 you can simply recompile your application with the new packages with this property turned on and just distribute your new executable!

What to Expect

So what can you expect from this new print engine? We're hoping you'll give us some feedback in this area! Many of the reported bugs ONLY occurred at the customer site. Application developers were unable to reproduce the errors and we were unable to reproduce them in-house as well. We're expecting it to fix errors related to "COM object method invocation error." on the ComPrintOptions/ComSelectPrinter/ComPrinterName calls. Also errors related to not being able to find a printer that you know is present. ComExportOptions errors should also be alleviated by this fix. Additionally, some developers have reported that printing can be slow on Terminal Servers. Although we haven't been able to duplicate this issue, it may positively impact print speed on terminal servers as well.

Your Feedback is Appreciated

As you can tell, we need YOUR help with this. Many of the bug reports we've received have NEVER been duplicated by us or the application developer! This means we need you to test this release as much as possible. We only have a limited set of printers, computers, and network configurations we can test against. If you can, please help us make this release of Flex2Crystal the best ever.

Please leave a comment on this post below to provide any feedback.