I am using ActiveX and batch printer. Printing is activated from an Excel workbook which is activated from ASP.NET. When I print manually from Excel to the Batch PDF printer it works. When I print through ASP.NET the files are being sent to the printer (There is a standard WServer 2003  option to keep the documents after they have been printed, so I can see them sitting in the queue afterwards). But the files are not to be found on the specified location, nor anywhere else. I can also see in the Batchpdf.ini file that file and pathnames are set correctly. (I do this from VB)

A reason may be that ASP.NET runs under a system account. But if there is some file permission issue I would expect some error message somewhere. I turned on logging at the main window of PDF reDirect but to no avail. I also thought of copying all settings from the administrator location (\documents and settings .. administrator .. application data\ to the same location of 'default user', as the ASP.NET system account is not looking in the administrator account. Log files are not created for Batch PDF in either location. (They are for 'normal' PDF reDirect use).

Pleas advise me how to diagnose further ?

 

Some details:
Windows Server 2003

Excel 2003

PDF Redirect Pro 2.2.5

Thanks for responding on a saturday. Great support!

I will be waiting for your disgnostic version of port monitor. In the mean time, I could check something: where does the port monitor store the ps file ? I've had a couple of security issues regarding file access with this application, this could be just one more.

Kind regards

Marcel Payens

Rumoldus

I also registered PDF Redirect under this account.

Thanks again for your support.

Tomorrow I will be at my client's location, and I will be able to test.

As I explained the 26th I am running now under a specially created user account and I would prefer to keep it that way (I can tune security better under this account). But is the fact that I get a pop-up explained with your last finding  (I mean is it likely that copying the batch printer settings  to this obscure location is also going to work for this user account ?)

 

I also tried the systems account, after copying the PDF-settings folder to above mentioned location (C:\Windows\System32\etc. etc. It was noteworthy that a PDF Redirect folder existed, but not the BatchPDF subfolder. No luck, though. This resulted in an exception (ASP.NET level) that a printer with such a name did not exist. I couldn't find anything wrong there. The printer exists and is accessible to everybody.

In the case of the 'Normal' user account, no error occurs and also an entry in the Event log is made to indicate that a document is printed to BatchPDF. No errors to be found anywhere, just no PDF. If I leave all printed documents in the print Queue (a Windows printer option), I see all jobs with correct names, with status 'Printed'.

Where to go from now ? My client is getting slightly impatient.

As stated before, I would prefer to stay with the option of the normal user account, not the system account.

 

Regards

The exception that I reported before was not created by PDF-redirect, sorry for the confusion.

Last week you suggested providing a test version of the port monitor, that would provide detailed error information (possibly to the Event logger ?). I see that as a last resort, is it feasible ? I need to get this working shortly and I don't want to turn to another solution.

 

Best regards

While testing on my laptop I found something unexpected.

In the function Batch_Printer_Load_Settings( printername as string) the printername is case sensitive. It will not be the current problem at the server (I know that there the name is all caps) but it may be confusing to other users.