Printing through a web application

[Gayatri Ganesh]

Hi,

I have a web based application. Through this application, when the user clicks a print button on the screen it should generate a pdf file and store it on the server side and also fire a print command on a printer on the client side.
How can I do this through Java ?
since the file is created on the server side and the JSP is on the server side I do not know how to pint it on the client side ?
Any ideas would be appreciated.

thanks,
gayatri

[Paul Clapham]

Fortunately, from your web application you can't cause something to print on the client's printer. It's bad enough that certain websites pop up advertising windows all over the place, imagine if they could print ads on your printer!

What you should do is send the PDF data as a response in the standard way. If done right, this will open Adobe Acrobat on the client's system with the PDF loaded into it. There's a "print" button in Acrobat which the person at the client's system can use if they want to print the document.

That also means the button shouldn't say "Print". It should say something like "Download" instead.

[Gayatri Ganesh]

thanks Paul.