Skip to main content
21-Topaz I
February 17, 2020
Question

Print the CN web page

  • February 17, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 5436 views

Has anyone ever been able to print out the web page of a change notice?  I don't want a to create a report.  I have some users that wants to print out one of our custom tabs.  It has some tables from all the other out of the box tabs on one page and we want to print that out.

 

I even asked one of our IT people if they have a program that will print out the whole web page and he said he did not have one or even knew of one.

3 replies

17-Peridot
February 18, 2020

Steve - what information are they looking to include?  We'd be interested to hear.  I am assuming it is not included in the OOTB CN Summary report?

17-Peridot
February 19, 2020

Most customer haven't Cognos installed since this is necessary even for the basic CM summary reports.

So this won't help and I programmed a lot reports with FOP just to get the around Cognos. But I've heard that there is hope with Windchill 12. Can you already confirm, that Cognos will be deprecated?

17-Peridot
February 19, 2020

@BjoernRueegg Separating out the issues with Cognos deployment the question was about the content of the CN Summary report.

 

Windchill 12.0.0.0 will have a new reporting engine available as well.

Marco Tosin
21-Topaz I
21-Topaz I
February 19, 2020

Hi Steve, if your require is only to print a web page, you can try this Firefox and Chrome add-on

 

https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/print-edit-we/

 

"Edit the contents of a web page prior to printing or saving. Elements in the web page can be edited, formatted, hidden or deleted. Unwanted content, such as adverts and sidebars, can easily be removed."

Marco
3-Newcomer
September 18, 2020

I have same requirement coming from the business, and print from chrome is poor even with extensions I've tried. It usually loses any information after what is visible on screen.

Did you ever find a better solution to this?

18-Opal
September 18, 2020

I've used two very different ways to do this.

Both technique could certainly be applied to a CN or whatever.

 

One way is:

Create a custom action menu option named "*Print" that the user can select from the CN info page action menu.

When user selects the Print option a JSP page opens that has passed the id of the CN to a method that gets all the info and returns it to the JSP where is is displayed to the user in any form you want.

User RMC and prints the page.

 

Advantage of this approach is more control over the look of the page to be printed and two clicks for the user.

 

Another way (I like this one) is:

1. Create a custom action menu option named "*Print" that the user can select from the CN info page action menu.

2.Create a Query Report that has all the info you need and a criteria that keys off the CN object id (You could uses number instead)

 

When the Print option is select by the user it opens a JSP that gets the CN object and passes it to a method that edits the report by replacing the id in the criteria with the id from the current CN.

The JSP then redirects to the edited report page.  

3. The user then selects "Generate" (or maybe checks the info they want or unchecks the info they don't want).

4. From the report output the user can then select one of the OOTB option to export as PDF, HTML, etc.

 

Both way work well.

If you don't care about the look I like the second way as it allows an Admin to edit the report template any time and everything still works.  Plus the user can check what they want displayed. You don't need to be a coder to edit the output.

Also, once you have this working it can be applied to any report template with very little work.

 

Here's an example where the goal was to show a WTDocument's content in the file vault.

This technique could certainly be applied to a CN or whatever.

 
 

GetFvItemMenuAction.png

GetFvItemReport.png

GetFvItemReportOutput.png

STEVEG21-Topaz IAuthor
21-Topaz I
September 24, 2020

Unfortunately, I have no knowledge of doing something like that.  I would have to get our partner company to create that which has a cost associated to it.  And we are all watching our pennies nowadays.