Printer Friendly Page with too big data to be passed

[Mohammed Derbashi]

Hi all, I'm trying to develope a printer friendly page, the problem is that the content of the page is the search results of another one, and I'm triying pass this content to the print page without having to perform the searching proccess again, in other words ... how can I pass a huge amount of data between these two pages using Client-Side only. By the way this contant should be in HTML format. Mohammed Derbashi Web Developer

[Nick Parker]

You can hide the values of the page in hidden tags:

and then you can request through client side code the value function WriteMe() { document.write("You searched criteria was " + window.opener.document.test.search.value); } You might need to double check the Javascript, but it looks something like this. Otherwise just repost back to the server. :) Nick Parker

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[Paul Watson]

Mohammed Derbashi wrote: I'm trying to develope a printer friendly page <Paul puts on his Preacher hat> You should not be trying to develop a seperate page for printing, it is conceptually unsound. First off as you have pointed out it can lead to uneeded server load. This is how you do it. You create two CSS files, one for the screen media, and the other for the print media. In the print media CSS file you basically use the display:none attribute to hide all the elements on the page you do not want to print. You also specify how you want the elments you want to print to look. In this way you can totally re-style a page for printing (e.g. getting rid of navigation, upping the font size, putting in page-breaks etc.) without two seperate ASP/HTML files. Also it requires no round trip to the server. The browser handles it for you. To reference your two CSS files you do this: <link rel="stylesheet" href="res/css/printable.css" type="text/css" **media="print"** /> for the print stylesheet and <link rel="stylesheet" href="res/css/default.css" type="text/css" **media="screen"** /> As an added bonus you can specify both media="screen, print" to say the default.css file applies to both media. Then when printing any duplicate classes in the printable.css file will override the default.css classes. Now lets say you have an input element on your page that you do not want to be printed. You assign it a class like so <input type="text" **class="inputelement"** id="txtFirstName" /> and then in the printable.css file you create a new class like so input.**inputelement**{ display:none } Here is a good article on it. One great benefit of doing this is that should you make a change to the page it will show in the screen and print versions without you having to modify two seperate ASP files. So maintenance is greatly improved. If you have any problems, just ask :) </Paul puts on his Preacher hat>

Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape To

[Not Active]

What about cross brwoser support? I've found that display:none doesn't work in Netcrape.

[Paul Watson]

Mark Nischalke wrote: What about cross brwoser support? I've found that display:none doesn't work in Netcrape It works in Netscape 6 and as of yesterday Netscape 4 should no longer be supported. So talking about cross browser it will work in IE5+, Opera 6+, Netscape 6+ and Mozilla 1+. Works on the Mac in those browsers too.

Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa