Re: Printing to only USB printer

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 11:49:29 GMT, "F L A S H" <flash@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>I have some dock workers who will use this utility to print labels with
>shipment identification numbers on them and stick them on boxes for a
>special project we are doing here at my Transportation company.

I figured that you were dealing with 'unsophisticated users' from the
mention of the Zebra printer - they are fairly specialized things.

>The users have other printers installed. They have a parallel LPT1 and
>several TCPIP networked printers. When I plug the USB Zebra printer into
>the PC I only want this application to print to it regardless of what
>printer is set as default and I don't want the user to have an option or
>choice of printers to use. I want it to be as user-friendly as possible in
>the fast paced warehouse environment.

Basically you want the system to be 'smart' so that there is minimal
configuration

However Mike is quite right, your code should be flexible, so that you
do not need to modify and recompile your App when the hardware
changes.

>PS. Could you tell me more about this .ini file?

INI files are an old and deprecated way of storing configuration data
- which is why old and deprecated programmers love them, despite what
the kiddies at MS say.

[SETTINGS]
PrinterName=Zebra LP2844
PrinterPort=USB001
LabelHeight=7.2
etc

The recommended method is to use GetPrivateProfileString and
SetPrivateProfileString - Windows APIs
- but the simplest way is to read/write the text file using plain VB
and pull out or push in the data using Mid$(), InStr() etc

The trick is to get the App working with hard coded stuff, then
abstract the hard coding to parameters held in a file on disk.
.