LabVIEW
Standard report alternative for the LabVIEW 2018
Solved!
LabVIEW 2018 can use HTML, Word or Exel report types. For some reason, Standard report was abandoned for the newer versions of LabVIEW. So there is no way to use Standard report when using newer versions of LabVIEW (2018).
However, the thing is that the Standard report was very good for the simple tasks like printing one/two line small sticker sized 10 X 10 mm (0,4 X 0,4 inch). Using the same code, just replacing report type from Standard to HTML causes huge issues for the printer. To be more clear, let's look Standard report and HTML report example. To make it as simple as possible, let take "Easy text report.vi" for LV2016 and "Create easy text report.vi".
This code print the sticker without any issues. When migrating to LV2018, this code is used.
When using HTML report, some kind of link is added to the document. Like automatic header. But as you can see, no header or footer text was selected. There is some kind of path inserted as a header. When I searched the forum posts I found out, that the reason for this could be Internet Explorer / Edge settings in windows registers. I don't want to be dependent on web browser settings. I mean if it was such a simple task before with a standard report, it shouldn't be a problem with newer version of LabVIEW using HTML report.
The question is if you faced the similar issues and what was your alternative for printing simple one line or two line report on small sticker. Please note that this is not regular sized A4 report, but small sticker. It can be that the HTML report works just fine for the A4 size. Oh yeah and before you answer: just use Word report… I would like to avoid word report.
For now, I am using the LabVIEW 2016 for this kind of projects and 2018 for the others. So is there a way of using standard report for the newest LabVIEW? Or some other report type that is behaving the same as the old standard report?
The older Standard Report used ActiveX under the hood which relied on some older Microsoft tools. I'm guessing NI wanted to remove these extra dependencies and move toward something semi standard like HTML.
When proposing this removal NI said that almost all features of the Standard Report, was inside the HTML report with only two known exceptions. The HTML report doesn't have a report tab width, and landscape mode isn't supported. In addition to that as you've already discovered reports that were Standard may look slightly different than HTML. Glad you found a workaround with a custom VI. Sorry you had issues with migrating. NI likely looked at the tools usage and figured not many would be effected by this deprecation.
