Hello,
I have blank pre-printed Certificate that I want to print data on top of my certificate on the respected places from my asp.net application. i m using asp.net 2.0 & Report Viewer. can you please guide me how to achive this. The positioning of the data on the blank certificate is important.
regards
Measure the blank certificate with a ruler and set your TextBoxes and other objects to those exact measurements. Make sure you set the page dimensions properly as well and account for the margins. Also, keep in mind you probably want your TextBox.AutoSize properties to be set to false so you can line things up right.
Another option is to scan the entire page and load it as a temporary background image for the report template while you're designing it. That way you can see what you're doing a bit better. But I wouldn't rely on it to be 100% accurate, so trust your measurements over the scanned image.
When you're testing, try a plain white sheet of paper cut to the same size. You should be able to hold it up to a strong light and see if things line up or not without wasting your certificate paper.
well, if the certificates are "cheap" - just print and test.
if they are expensive.. - scan the certificate - use that as a background when viewing the report (as a printed page) - test it and fix if needed - print it out on white paper without the background - look at it with the certifcicate and fix if needed
I did this a couple of years ago for numbered vouchers on a dot-matrix printer using Reporting Services 2005. I won't pretend it was simple or easy, but it definitely can be done.
As the others have said, you're probably best to find a way to get your own "dummy" copies of the real certificates so that you can make cheap mistakes while getting 80% or 95% of the way to where you need to be.
The most important thing to realize is that the Visual Studio report designer and the report viewer do NOT render the layout exactly the same. Should they? Yes. Do they? No.
As a result, what you see on the screen has to be treated as input into the black box between you and the printer and tweaks need to be made to get it exactly right.
To that end, I found that it was actually much easier to ditch the Visual Studio designer altogether for the report and went straight to editing the RDL in a text/XML editor (even if it is, in fact, Visual Studio).
It's relatively straightforward to read and work with, and gives you the clearest visibility to do the kind of measurement-specific adjustments mentioned by other answers. You basically don't want anything to be autosized or you're going to get weird results.
You also want to make sure that you run tests with various lengths of each of the values. On my vouchers, the first draft looked horrible when a REALLY long company name showed up and wrapped, causing a bunch of other stuff to move.
The bottom line, though, is that can be done and has been done before. It's going to be tedious, but is possible. Good luck.