I'm working on a web project in which I need to be able to communicate directly with my customer's printer. The customer uses my application through a browser, and would like to be able to click a button to print tickets uninterrupted, meaning there is no printer dialog popup from the browser. This requirement eliminates many traditional ways of sending information to the customer's printer, and because I want a solution that will work on any browser, solutions that use VBSCRIPT or other browser-dependent solutions will not work.
My initial solution for this problem was to create a Java applet that was loaded into the page dynamically when a "Print" button was clicked. However, browsers like Chrome and soon Firefox are removing support for NPAPI, which breaks my Java plugin.
The current solution I'm working on is to create a service in C# that the user installs locally on their machine, and then when the customer clicks the "Print" button, my server communicates with that service directly. This way I can bypass the browser restrictions, and the service running on the customer's machine will have full access to communicate with the target printer. The downside to this approach is that the user now has to install an additional bit of software on their machine, and for each machine they wish to access my application on and print from, that machine needs to have proper port-forwarding and firewall settings configured. I can make this work for my current customer, but with future customers it becomes a hassle. Furthermore, my new approach currently only supports Windows machines, and if future customers are using OS X or Linux, I will need to port the service.
Has anyone faced this problem before, or are there any ideas out there for how to communicate with a client's printer that is browser-independent?
There's no possible solution to this that both supports Chrome and doesn't require something to be installed on the machine; you can't run arbitrary code that interfaces with the OS from within Chrome. And the only way to interact with that other code besides a local web server would be Native Messaging in an extension, but that doesn't fulfill your cross-browser requirement.
you can't communication directly because of security. i also develop 1 application in c# for remotely printing.
there is one way if your client have remote printer then you can do this task easily make small app on server and integrate with all remote printer and you can execute printer command from server and print will comes from client printer
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I'm planning an app for work and venturing into potential features which I've not used before.
Essentially I need to be able to access files on a network share, read, write and delete files as well as amend the file names. As a pretty closed platform I'm not sure whether iOS is capable of such a thing and if it is, what features should I look for to begin researching?
My Google-Fu hasn't come up with anything thus far so hopefully looking for someone to point me in the right direction.
Thanks.
I know this isn't very secure, but I'd personally create an ASP.NET app on your target Windows Server, or a different Server on the domain. Create web services exposed, and make an iOS app with UIWebView. You can do RPC calls from the web service that do WMI/ADSI/File System manipulation. You can prompt for domain credentials, and do remote calls essentially is the gist.
You could expose the web app so that your app can access it from local network, or URL. If you were to access it from outside I'd suggest using some secure credentials in Windows/IIS.
Some years ago I created a "mobile-friendly" web app that allowed me to manage servers, perform RPC, and do basic Active Directory queries. Also allowed file listing and deletion/moving/copying with some creative scripting. It was essentially a ASP.NET/C# web app that loaded in a iPhone app. UIWebView in iOS was a able to load it, used AJAX and some other client side scripting that looked decent. You'd essentially have to make sure that your web app renders properly in Safari/UIWebView (which is bastardized safari).
Here's a link to a demo of what I created:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czXmubijHwQ&t=12s
I ran it in a browser, but it'd run from my PSP, Android test devices, iPod Touch, Blackberry, etc.
I'm trying to help a client who has a web application (ASP/C#) that integrates with Quickbooks via the QBXML SDK.
I want to open up a connection to an already active QuickBooks instance in a user session.
The relevant code in question:
if (rp == null)
rp = new RequestProcessor2();
if (!connected)
{
rp.OpenConnection2("IMS", "Internal Management System", QBXMLRPConnectionType.localQBD);
connected = true;
}
if (xticket == null)
xticket = rp.BeginSession(cfg.qbfile, QBFileMode.qbFileOpenMultiUser);
As is, this will attempt to launch a new instance of Quickbooks via DCOM, which is not a viable option. Following the QBSDK documention, I attempted to pass null to BeginSession's first argument, which should use the open qbw file.
However, instead of the expected action of connecting to the running instance of Quickbooks, it launches a new instance, eventually yielding the error:
"If the QuickBooks company data file is not open, a call to the "BeginSession" method must include the name of the data file."
The IIS AppPool running the web app uses the same user as the Quickbooks instance I'm trying to connect to.
This was all set up by a third party who is no longer available, and, of course, they left no documentation whatsoever on how this system was supposed to work. Any assistance would be welcome.
I'm trying to help a client who has a web application (ASP/C#) that integrates with Quickbooks via the QBXML SDK.
Unfortunately, this approach will not work.
It's a well-known limitation of QuickBooks that:
QuickBooks has to be running in the user session you're trying to connect from
QuickBooks has to have access to a GUI (it uses a GUI message pump to function)
Because your web app is running in from within IIS, neither of those two criteria are met, and connections to QuickBooks will fail. You should be using the QuickBooks Web Connector instead.
I want to open up a connection to an already active QuickBooks instance in a user session.
Unfortunately, QuickBooks won't allow this.
I managed to create an acceptable workaround to my problem, for anyone trying something similar. (Which, honestly, I don't recommend. I'm working with legacy code here.)
First, a brief overview of my research:
The QBXml interface with QuickBooks uses COM requests in order to communicate. Now, for whatever reason, whether design, bug, or limitation in COM, Quickbooks cannot communicate across LSA Logon Sessions. In practice, this means that the same console session that Quickbooks is running under must also run the QBXml code. Additionally, both Quickbooks and your application must have the same UAC elevation status.
I found no way to get IIS to reliably launch Quickbooks. The individual who setup this system before me managed to do so through some very... unorthodox methods. It was incredibly flaky, and the cause of multiple issues.
Regardless, I did manage an acceptable workaround, in the form of IIS Express. IIS Express can run under a standard user session. As such, running both Quickbooks and the web app (through IIS Express) under the same Logon Session allowed them to communicate successfully.
It is not a permanent solution, as there are drawbacks to running a service such as this in a standard user paradigm, but it is an acceptable workaround, and will allow my client to run their business while we refactor. I plan to first decouple the portions of the app that communicate with Quickbooks, moving them into their own codebase. This will allow the web facing portions of the app to operate in a more standard manner, and communicate with the QB integration code through a more reliable means than COM calls.
Thanks to Keith Palmer for helping point me in the right direction.
How is it possible to hide printers that are locally installed on the AOS server for specific users for a AX client that is hosted using terminal services?
It still needs to be possible to print to the printers from the AOS while setting up print job settings in the code from AX client and all of the users, but certain users should not be able to see the printers, or a certain number of printers, in the print job settings dialog when it comes up.
Or, is it possible to define whether or not certain users have access to certain printers from the AOS?
Note: You can set in the client settings whether or not printers should be usable from the AOS, but if you are using terminal services for hosting the AX client, then all users are using the same configuration and therefore, if you want to set it so that one user can see the AOS printers, than all of the users are able to see the printers from the AOS. (Or I am mistaken here?)
It is not possible make user security on printer from AX.
It may be possible using Windows security, but it might backfire if AX can see the printer but not use it.
I know that a web browser is a GUI control But here is a problem:
I have a Windows service and I want it to grab a web page from Internet and let the JavaScript code to be executed and then processes the result on that page and keeps Cookies.
is there any way to simulate Web Browser or Create a Hidden window and assign a web browser to it from inside windows service ?
Using a GUI control in session 0 will likely fail. You can enable the Allow service to interact with desktop setting for the service. This won't result in the control being visible on the desktop, but it will let the interactive desktop API calls in the service succeed. Whether this works for you, I cannot predict. It's your best hope of getting something out of a GUI control in a service. But do not be surprised if even that does not work.
What you should do though is to perform your tasks without a GUI at all. There are headless browsers that are designed for use in services/daemons. For instance PhantomJS, but there are others. This old question has an excellent set of links: Headless Browser and scraping - solutions
I have a Delphi application running in a server. This application do some critical work with my DB which is used in other applications and executes when a user logs in to Windows. It all is working fine, but, turns out the server's administrator sometimes reboot the server and does not log in to Windows. The server stays in Windows Login and my application doesn't start.
After a small research I decided to create a Windows Service to start my application even before a user logs in Windows. But, I have two forms. One form shows the Current Process that my application is executing and the other one edite a .ini file that its used to configure the first form.
What I need to be done is to create a service that starts my application before a user logs in Windows and after logging in, show my forms or open it but minimize it to System Tray.
Is it possible to use Windows Service with this behavior and minimize my forms to the System Tray?
A service cannot display a UI at all (including a System Tray icon) in Vista onwards, and it is discouraged in earlier versions. In all versions of Windows, you should be separating the UI out into its own non-service application that can be run by a logged-in user, manages the system tray icon for that user's tray, and communicates with the backend service as needed using any number of available IPC mechanisms (pipes, sockets, COM, RPC, WCF, etc).
Well, you can have a form in a service, but is has to run as Administrator and must be set up as an interactive service.
I've used SVCOM to create nice services with tray icons and a form that can minimize to system tray.
Have a look here: http://www.aldyn.ru/products/index.html
Hope this helps