Printing Reports from the HTML5 Report Viewer

This article elaborates on how to set up the viewer for printing reports.

The printing functionality is based on rendering the report in PDF format with special settings so that when the PDF file opens in a browser, the PDF plug-in's Print dialog is directly invoked.

The print functionality requires:

• Adobe Acrobat Reader / Adobe Acrobat browser plug-in or Chrome PDF plug-in (for Chrome) should be installed and enabled. For more information on configuring the Adobe PDF plug-in please refer to the Configure browser to use the Adobe PDF plug-in article. If Adobe Reader or Chrome PDF plug-in is not detected, clicking the print button would export the report to PDF. Depending on the browser the PDF would either open directly for preview or ask you to save it as a file.
• Disable any other PDF-related plug-ins such as Foxit.
• JavaScript should be enabled in your browser.
• JavaScript should be enabled in Adobe Reader.

In Google Chrome 77+ printing is allowed only in response to a user gesture. This prevents the print dialog from opening automatically when a PDF is embedded in a web page and the user needs to click on the print button manually to invoke the print preview dialog.

In Chromium-based browsers, there is an option to always and automatically download PDF documents in the pdfDocuments settings. If enabled, it prevents the print dialog from opening and must be disabled for the printing functionality to work as expected - Troubleshooting TelerikReportViewer execCommand JavaScript Error.

In Firefox 19+ the default viewing option for PDF files is the PDF.js, which is not added as a plug-in and Firefox does not expose the content type viewing preferences - Firefox bugs. Thus the Adobe PDF plug-in is always active whether or not it is the preferred viewing option. To ensure the print operation in Firefox will be accomplished, clicking the print button will export the report to PDF which will be printed with the available client viewing tools.

By default, the viewer widget tries to use the PDF plug-in of the browser for printing. When it is not available or not supported, the widget falls back to exporting to a PDF file containing a special 'print' script. The purpose of this script is to open the Print dialog of the PDF reader right after the file has been opened.

You can manually control the printing behavior through the printMode option when creating the report viewer widget. When the value is set to telerikReportViewer.PrintModes.FORCE_PDF_FILE the widget will always export the report document to a PDF file with the special 'print' script. When the value is set to telerikReportViewer.PrintModes.FORCE_PDF_PLUGIN the widget will always try to use the PDF plug-in. In this case, if the browser doesn't have a PDF plug-in or it does not support the 'print' script nothing will happen. By default when the value is not explicitly set, the widget will try to automatically determine whether to export the report document or use the browser's PDF plug-in. This is equivalent to setting the telerikReportViewer.PrintModes.AUTO_SELECT value.

You can also implement a custom logic for dynamically specifying the print mode. For example:

// Force the viewer to always use the PDF plug-in for printing in the Chrome browser.
// In the other browsers the report document will be downloaded as a PDF file:
var printMode = /(chrome)/.test(navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase())
    ? telerikReportViewer.PrintModes.FORCE_PDF_PLUGIN
    : telerikReportViewer.PrintModes.FORCE_PDF_FILE;
$("#reportViewer1")
    .telerik_ReportViewer({
        serviceUrl: "../api/reports/",
        templateUrl: 'src/templates/telerikReportViewerTemplate-18.2.24.924.html',
        reportSource: { report: "product catalog.trdp" },
        printMode: printMode
    });

See Also

• HTML5 Report Viewer Overview
• Troubleshooting TelerikReportViewer execCommand JavaScript Error