Batch Printing of Specific .pdf documents in sequence

alan_otani@hna.honda.com

I have a requirement to create a process that will print a specific batch of .pdf documents stored in Content Server in a specific sequence.  The number of documents can be more than several hundred.  Using C# and CWS, I can download the content and print the documents, but the performance of printing the document using Adobe is very slow . . . upwards of 10 seconds for Adobe to successfully open/spool/print each document. 

Is there a means of speeding up the process? 

I can download the content/documents into a folder and name them in the desired sequence, does anyone know of a means of batch printing the entire folder in that sequence or possibly merging all the content into a single document for printing?

Any thoughts/suggestions would be appreciated.

Nizar Ghazal

Quoted Alan Otani on 12/22/2017 10:36 AM:

I have a requirement to create a process that will print a specific batch of .pdf documents stored in Content Server in a specific sequence.  The number of documents can be more than several hundred.  Using C# and CWS, I can download the content and print the documents, but the performance of printing the document using Adobe is very slow . . . upwards of 10 seconds for Adobe to successfully open/spool/print each document. 

Is there a means of speeding up the process? 

I can download the content/documents into a folder and name them in the desired sequence, does anyone know of a means of batch printing the entire folder in that sequence or possibly merging all the content into a single document for printing?

Any thoughts/suggestions would be appreciated.

Hi Alan,

There seems to be a very handy library, PDFSharp, that handles the merging for you. (http://www.pdfsharp.net/Downloads.ashx)

A cursory look found me the following: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/808670/combine-two-or-more-pdfs

I liked JustMaier's approach, and I was able to add it into a CWS code sample, where I downloaded each file into a folder, and set the target to a destination to be picked up, for print.

Just open up the PDFSharp project file in your Visual Studio of choice, right-click to "build" it in the Solution Explorer, so it generates the assembly .dll you can reference in your CWS code, so you get all the handy merge ability.

 

I first downloaded each file into: C:\CWS\Print

For the sake of simplicity, I just downloaded the same file 10 times, but it has a different name.

I then used the super simple Directory.GetFiles() method that's built into System.IO:

 string[] forMerge = Directory.GetFiles(origin, "PrintPDF*");

That gets each PDF that begins with PrintPDF, but you could do whatever for its search criteria. The "origin" being the filePath string I downloaded everything into, using the ContentService.

MergePDFs(targetPath, forMerge);

The targetPath being the merge folder I want to have picked up on, and printed. 

The only oddity I ran into, with the code I used, is that I had to specify the exact path and name for the output file, as so:

string targetPath = @C:\CWS\Print\MERGE\Test.PDF;

Otherwise, the MergePDFs method wouldn't actually save the file to disk. 

Then, as you've figured out, before, you can print this, with something like this:

   static void SendToPrinter(string filePath)
        {
            ProcessStartInfo info = new ProcessStartInfo();
            info.Verb = "print";
            info.FileName = filePath;
            info.CreateNoWindow = true;
            info.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden;

            Process p = new Process();
            p.StartInfo = info;
            p.Start();

            p.WaitForInputIdle();
            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(3000);
            if (false == p.CloseMainWindow())
                p.Kill();
        }

I hope that helps!