Printing documents from a view (web)

I almost have my summer-break so in order not to forget what I have been doing lately here a summary of my activities on development: 

Recently I have been working on some projects which all had one thing in common: ‘printing documents from a web browser’.  In this article I describe you my solution how provide a funtion to print (multiple) documents from a web view, with maintaining the often used previous-next navigation in Domino views.

The function is based upon the idea of a cookie. In the cookie you write the document unique ID of the document you want to add to your print selection, and at the end, the point that the user want to actually print the selection, all documents will be collected via an AJAX request and added on a new window.

I have no idea what the performance impact are and have not tested the application well in IE, I assume there might be some considerations using different browser types and versions.

In the view for each document the user has the option to ‘add’ this document to his ‘selection’. The selected document will be presented in a DIV below the view. Also the icon will change from blue to a more inactive ‘purple’:

In the example above the user has selected 2 documents, which can be deleted in 2 ways from the selection:

– document one by one

– all documents at once

Att the bottom the print icon uses a JavaScript function that makes an AJAX request for each document UNID in the cookie and writes the result (HTML) to a new window:

Since the whole idea is based upon a normal default Domino view and it support the option to use the previous-next navigation I think this approach should be easy to implement in most applications.

A sample of the application can be found here. Since this was only one of my approaches to enable printing Notes documents from a webbrowser there is more to come soon.

Now I can really start backpacking at ease 🙂