Tip: How to Print a Crystal Report Programmatically in ASP.NET?

You can print a Crystal Report using the print option of Crystal Report Viewer. However, there are occasions when you want your application to print a report directly to the printer without viewing the report in Crystal Report Viewer.

 

The ReportDocument class provides PrintToPrinter method that may be used to print a CR direct to the printer. If no printer is selected, the default printer will be used to send the printing pages to.

 

The PrintToPrinter method takes four parameters.

 

nCopies : Indicates the number of copies to print.

collated : Indicates whether to collate the pages.

startPageN : Indicates the first page to print.

endPageN : Indicates the last page to print.

 

The following steps will guide you to achieve the same:

1. Add a crystal report (.cr) file to your ASP.NET application.
2. Add a report instance on the page level.

   Dim report As MyReport = New MyReport

3. Populate reports data on Page_Init 

   ' Get data in a DataSet or DataTable
   
   Dim ds As DataSet = GetData()
   ' Fill report with the data
   report.SetDataSource(ds)

4. Print Report

   report.PrintToPrinter(1, False, 0, 0)

If you wish to print a certain page range, change the last two parameters From To page number.

 

If you want to set page margins, you need to create a PageMargin object and set PrintOptions of the ReportDocument.

 

The following code sets page margins and printer name:

Dim margins As PageMargins =  Report.PrintOptions.PageMargins
   margins.bottomMargin = 200
   margins.leftMargin = 200
   margins.rightMargin = 50
   margins.topMargin = 100
   Report.PrintOptions.ApplyPageMargins(margins)

   ' Select the printer name
   Report.PrintOptions.PrinterName = printerName