I've been programming an application that deals with a POS printer. The printer is BIXOLON branded, and I haven't found any SDKs for using this type of printers as well as no example on how to deal with it.
Since I'm new to this type of printer, I don't know how should I design my report as well as which report engine should I use.
Any advice will be helpful.
I have worked on POS printers before to issue receipts etc.
What I did is to read in a template from a rtf file, set some variables that is to be replaced.
For example for the receipt I want to have the name of the person, so in the rtf file template, I would put something like <NAME>. When I read in the content of the rtf file, i just do a string.replace to replace <NAME> with the actual text in my program. Once I have replaced all the variables, using the class found in this link.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms996492.aspx#wnf_richtextbox_topic06 , I have a well formatted rtf and ready to be printed.
Printing wise works just like other printer. This means that as long as your coding targeted the correct printer and using the correct setup, it should be printed correctly. The only difference is that printing on a office printer would give u a A4 size, whereas printing on a POS printer will give you the size allowed by the POS printer. Just remember to format your rtf well.
Most report engines (I'm thinking of Reporting Services in particular) won't need this level of programming to print reports. You will get that functionality out of the box as long as the printer drivers are installed on the machine you wish to print reports from.
It was so simple, I used crystal report to design my report and then easily show.