BMP image intermittently disappears from printed output generated by Crystal Reports .Net Engines

[timothyromine]

I have created a report in CR that generates checks for customers.  These checks contain a BMP image of a signature.  The report is run from an intranet application and is run using the .Net engine for CR.  The report usually gets run once a month and generates 1500 to 2500 checks in a single output job that is sent directly to a printer.  In most cases, the checks print without incident.  However, in some customer's offices, I have seen this report randomly not display the signature image on some of the checks within a print run.  300 or 400 checks may print fine, then 20 or so won't have the image, and then another 200 have the image, and so on.

The signature images are monochrome and are scanned at 600 dpi.  They are not overlayed or underlayed by any other objects in the detail section.

I have seen this behavior in the .Net engine provided with:

CR 10 Adv. Dev.

CR XI Dev.

CR XI R2

CR 2008

CR for VS .Net 2010

This issue does not occur when I run the report from within any version of the developent application.

[former_member183750]

Had a customer with pretty well an identical issue; Running a number of reports with images. All of a sudden, images stop printing. Rerun the same report and voila, images are back.

Turned out to be a printer driver issue:

1. Make sure you have the latest updates for your printer driver
2. Make sure the printer driver used is actually designed for the OS

- Ludek

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[timothyromine]

Thanks, Ludek.  Yeah, tried that - it's one of the first things, besides having the latest CR Service packs, that I tell customers to do. 

The current office I am dealing with this for is using CR for VS .Net 2010 (32-bit) and have the latest print drivers for their printers.  They are not using any HP Universal drivers anywhere on their system.

Do you recall if the customer you helped was having problems with all images or only ones of a certain format or DPI?

[timothyromine]

Should have mentioned that the office is using CR for VS .Net 2010 SP1.  They cannot use SP2 or 3 as the HTML export function in these service packs now exports quotation marks as actual quotation marks rather than their hex code equivalent (like every version of CR before this did).

[former_member183750]

The images with this customer were quite uniform. They only had about 1/2 dozen images and depending on some scanned barcode, the app decided what image to insert on to the report. Typically, the issue you are seeing is the result of the engine not getting the correct info for where the image is located. For example, if the image is in c:\test and the passed in value is c:\test2, then there will be no image shown and no error either.

Umm, SP4 may be worth trying. Though I am not convinced this is a CR issue as such. I'm not familiar with the specifics of the HTML issue, but there were two fixes re. HTML in SP4. Admittedly, neither looks like the issue you describe, but it may be that as the documented fixes were done, your issue may have been also resolved - more by accident than anything else:

ADAPT01614677: Navigation formatting issues exporting to HTML - increasing page length

ADAPT01624661: HTML export navigation controls not translated to localize language

SP4 links are here:

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7824

Other reasons for the issue;

1. Too many print jobs submitted to the print engine; Make sure you are using .Close and .Dispose as you get done with each report
2. The printer buffer is not able to handle the number of print requests; increase the buffer if possible. Put one or two tenth of a second delay between each report print
3. If the database is being updated, perhaps the update is not completed before the report queries for the data

- Ludek

[timothyromine]

The report only has the one image and it is embedded in the report - it is not set to refresh each time the report is run.

Response to "Other reasons":

1.  At the time the checks are being printed, there are no other print jobs of any sort running.  The check printing process creates one print job with all the checks in it.

2.  Only the one request is active at the time.  I will look into the buffer size.  Maybe IIS is running out of space and resetting.

3.  All database updates are completed before any printing begins.  The data is static until the check printing process completes and the user manually initiates the final update.

Glad to hear SP 4 is out - I will test that for the quotation mark issue ASAP.

Thanks again for your assistance.  This has given me a couple of directions to investigate.

Tim