Publishing Reports to the Web - Downloads - Oracle

Frequently Asked Questions
How do you dynamically change the printer tray setting in the midst of a
print job?
In some cases, you may want to switch printer trays in the middle of a report. For
example, you might want the first page of a report printed on letterhead stationary
and subsequent pages printed on plain white paper. For character mode reports, you
can achieve this result through a combination of editing the .prt file and changing the
report’s properties. For bit-mapped reports, you use the SRW.SET_PRINTER_TRAY
built-in function. On UNIX, this functionality is supported for PostScript output but
not PCL output. For PCL, Oracle Reports ignores the commands for changing
orientation and paper tray. Although dynamically changing the orientation and
printer tray for PCL is not supported on UNIX, you can change them at runtime
through the print dialog box for PCL.
By using the Before Report, Between Pages, or format triggers you can switch to
different printer trays as your report formats. This allows you to easily print pages of
the same report on different sheets of paper.
SRW.SET_PRINTER_TRAY is a built in Oracle Reports function for setting the printer
tray. The Reports Builder online help system describes this function’s syntax.
Example
From the Before Report trigger, you can set the printer tray for the very first page:
function BeforeReport return boolean is
begin
srw.set_printer_tray('UPPER PAPER TRAY');
return (TRUE);
end;
To set the printer tray dynamically for subsequent pages, add a format Trigger to an
item that prints on each page of the report. The following code checks for even pages
and sets the page number accordingly:
function B_tbpFormatTrigger return boolean is
page_num number;
begin
srw.get_page_num(page_num);
begin
if mod(page_num, 2) = 0 then
srw.set_printer_tray('UPPER PAPER TRAY');
else
srw.set_printer_tray('LOWER PAPER TRAY');
end if;
return (true);
end;
end;
Why does the external print command ignore the tray select option while
trying to print the PostScript output generated by Oracle Reports?
Suppose that you enter the following print command:
- lp -dprinter -oupper $report_print_file1
In this case, the -oupper option in the lp command is ignored. The reason for this
behavior is that Oracle Reports generates tray information in its PostScript output. The
tray selection in the PostScript overrides the specification on the command line. If you
want the tray information on the command line to be respected, you need to remove
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