Print Queue Hangup?

[Sirin]

I recently installed a program at a customer site that prints out data reports after each customer process finishes running (about every 10-20 minutes). I'm printing out the reports by running two VIs (the report is two pages long), one for each page; set to 'print at VI completion'.

I was recently told by the customer that the system stopped printing out these reports, although it was still archiving the data from them (meaning that in my code it is still requesting printing). I asked them to try to print something from Notepad and see if it printed out; and they called me back and told me that there were a couple thousand documents in the print queue! They cleared out the print queue then everything worked alright again.

I am printing to a HP 1022N printer via a TCP/IP network. I'm just curious if anyone has ever seen anything like this before, and if so if it is a windows type problem, or if there is something that I have done wrong in my LabVIEW program?

[PaulG.]

Are you creating these reports with Report vi's?

Paul

LV 7.1/XP/2000

[Sirin]

No, I don't have the report VIs. I just made a VI with the front panel looking like a report and set the VI to 'print on completion' and run it whenever I want to print a report. (The inputs into the VI are two clusters that contain all of the data for the report.)

[AESulzer]

I can't say I've ever experienced the problem in LabVIEW, but I've certainly dealt with my fair share of printer problems before. Typically, if one thing goes wrong with one document in a printer, print requests will just queue up until it has been reset or until that magic button has been pressed to make the red light stop blinking. Most likely this is all that has happened in your case. If it happens again or if it is in any way reproducible, please post again!

Kind Regards,

[unclebump]

If this is on a windows machine and you have scripting enabled, you can run a cscript and read WMI information that shows printer/queue status.

Here are some example scripts.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/printing/servers/default.mspx

I can make an example when I'm at work tomorrow.

Message Edited by unclebump on 10-18-2005 05:58 PM