Previewing Print Output
When the Print Preview option button is selected in the JADE development environment Print Options dialog or the appropriate option is selected in a JADE runtime application, the first page of your report is displayed on the workstation monitor when the OK button is clicked, instead of output to the printer.
When a skin was used to preview the printing of a form and the background color of the skin had a white brush, the boundary of the printed output preview was not evident in earlier releases.
If the form or control is defined with a non‑default background color, that color is therefore used to draw the background, and the skin background definition is ignored so that the skin background is consistent, regardless of whether it is defined with a brush or a color.
Print output is directed to the preview file when the Printer class printPreview property is set to true.
As the print preview shows what your output will look like on a specific printer, the printer must be known before the preview is generated. (Paper sizes, printable regions, paper trays, and so on are not consistent across all printers.)
The Print button on the print preview does not necessarily send the output to your default printer; it is sent to the printer of the current print task (which defaults to your default printer).
The Title caption contains the current page that is being previewed and the total number of pages for your report; for example:
Preview of page 3 of 8 page report
When you click on an area of a page previewed in a reduced form, the page is expanded with the selected area of the page centered on the workstation monitor. Click on an expanded page to reduce the previewed page.
You can page or scroll through the report, or you can select one of the buttons listed in the following table.
| Button | Action |
|---|---|
| Previous Page | Displays the previous page of the report. |
| Next Page | Displays the next page of the report. |
| First Page | Displays the first page of the report. |
| Last Page | Displays the last page of the report. |
| Specific Page | Displays the Print Page Select dialog, to enable you to specify a valid number of the page that you want to preview. |
| Expand (or Reduce) | Zooms in to display the report across the width of the monitor. When the report is expanded, the button is captioned Reduce, to enable expanded output to be reduced or zoomed out. |
| Print Report | Directs the report to the default printer or the printer specified in the Print Setup dialog. |
| Print Selected | Displays the Select Pages To Print dialog (for details, see "Using the Select Pages To Print Dialog", in the following subsection). |
| Find | Displays the Find Text dialog (for details, see "Searching Previewed Output", later in this section). |
| Find Next | Finds the next occurrence of the text specified in the Find Text dialog. |
| Cancel | Cancels the print preview. |
Buttons that are not valid are disabled. For example, if the report has only one page the Next Page, Previous Page, First Page, Last Page, and Specific Page buttons are disabled. If the first page of a multiple page report is displayed, the Previous Page button is disabled. For details about controlling the display of the Print Report and Print Selected buttons during print preview, see the Printer class printPreviewAllowSelect property, earlier in this section.
The preview output is held in transient objects on your workstation until you choose to print or cancel it.
When the presentation client requests a print preview, the pages of the printed report do not have to be transferred to and from the application server. (This optimizes the performance of the print preview process when running JADE thin client mode over a slow network.) However, if your application calls the Printer class setReport method to indicate that user logic subsequently stores or manipulates the report output, each page of output is transferred to the application server.
