Printing from Reporting Services – Back to Basics

Printing from Reporting Services – Back to Basics

Reporting Services has never struck me as something that it\’s desirable to print reports from. I don\’t see the point (if you\’re keeping historical reports), and these days we\’re all about saving the planet by reducing the amount of office consumables we…… erm…….consume.

However, that said, it may be a requirement to have a hard copy of something from Reporting Services, so Microsoft have usefully provided a \’print\’ button in right there in the browser window. Happy Days !

Or not.

I was a bit flummoxed the other day when I got a call about \’my Reports won\’t print off. All I get is a rubbish error message.\” With a heavy heart, I set to, getting the proper text of the said rubbish error message, which was this:

\”An error occurred during printing (0x80004005)\”

A nice, concise, and helpful explanation, I thought.

OK, so what does your favourite search engine have to say about THAT ? Plenty, as it turns out. Mostly to do with the RSClientPrint DLL that\’s downloaded (if you\’ve enabled this option on your Reporting Services server), it being the right version, the browser having permission to download and run signed ActiveX scripts, and a whole pile of KB articles about what you can hack about with if you see this message.

One of the things it won\’t tell you is that you need to have a default printer set within your Windows user profile, otherwise the \’print\’ button won\’t even get as far as letting you choose an output device (or \’Printer\’, as they used to be called).

So, notwithstanding all the excellent advice in that heap of KB articles, MSDN forums and StackOverflow, sometimes you just have to got back to first principles, like setting up a default printer.

The only thing you have to contend with then is the general complexity of the report, whether or not it will render properly in PCL (do they still use PCL to talk to printers ? I\’ve forgotten…), and all the other stuff in those online resources I just mentioned.

Oh, and if you still can\’t get it to print from the button, try asking these two questions:

\”Why do you need a printout of this 1400-page report ?\”

…and…

\”Can\’t you just export the report to PDF, and print that, because that method works OK ?\”

Just try to resist storing that 1400-page PDF in Sharepoint, if you don\’t mind.

Back soon !