Silverlight - Printing

Question

Hello,

I have a Silverlight application that has a DataGrid. I need to print the selected items in the DataGrid. However, I do not want to use a WritableBitmap. Is there a way for me to pass just those items to either a WCF Service or a .aspx page and render HTML that will prompt the user to print? If so, how?

Thank you,

Answer 1

If you're using Silverlight 4, you could use the printing API, but I guess you would not ask this question in this case.

In Silverlight 3, I think you have to resort to some kind of hack, where you SL code calls a JavaScript function, giving it the selected data in some format. This function could open a new window where the data is re-displayed in a print-friendly format and then printed.

I mention a new window, because I guess the window hosting the SL content already has some content that is unrelated to the data to print.

Answer 2

Prior to SL4:

1. Create a WCF service that:
   • takes in an XML blob
   • renders it as PDF (one way to do that is to use FO)
   • stores it in some temp area with unique id
   • returns the id to the client
2. Create an .aspx page that:
   • takes in an id of a PDF file returned by WCF service
   • streams the generated PDF to the client (with proper Content-Type)
3. SL client:
   • invokes WCF service and gets the id of the generated PDF file
   • constructs the URL of the generated PDF file
   • uses any of JavaScript tricks to popup that URL in the browser (one way is to have a hidden IFRAME and set its source to the URL)