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Logical Printers

There are three management aspects of logical printers. The first one is to add/name them. This is done using the Logical Printers form. The Logical Printers added/named here will be available to users throughout IFS Cloud.

  • PRINTER ID
    The unique name give to the Logical Printer.
  • DESCRIPTION
    The descriptive name give to the Logical Printer. This is the name that is shown in the Print Dialog under the Printers section.

The second management aspect of Logical Printers is to map them to physical printers. This mapping is done in the Print Agent configuration . A standard IFS Cloud installation comes with a couple of special/predefined logical printers (PDF_PRINTER, NO_PRINTOUT, SEND_XML_TO_CONNECT, SEND_FULL_XML_TO_CONNECT, and SEND_PDF_TO_CONNECT). These special printers are never mapped to physical printers, since they are not actually used for printouts. These special printers are used to trigger creation and/or distribution of electronic documents rather than physical printouts.

The third management aspect of Logical Printers is that it's possible to set up rules/logic for what printer should be used/suggested in various situations based on different criteria. There are two ways in which this can be controlled. Either using the support provided by functionality in the APPSRV component of IFS Cloud, where it's possible to control default printers based on report id, user id, and language. For convenience it's possible to see/manage the Logical Printers naming here as well. Refer to IFS Cloud Documentation for Printer Management for more information.

You can also manage default printers by using the Report Rule Engine and create rules for which printer to use based on some desired criteria. This approach provides higher flexibility and you can do a lot more, but it requires the FNDRRE component which is a separate sales article and may not be available in all IFS Cloud installations. Read more about the Report Rules concept and how to configure Report Rules.

Setting up rules for default printers will make sure the desired printer is pre-selected in the print dialog when printing from within IFS Cloud. The default value also affects the printer used when generating print jobs as part of a business flow where no specific printer is specified in the flow itself.

When all of the above is not configured, you can still configure which Logical Printers to use as the default Logical Printers if one is not specified in the print request. You can set this by the following system parameter.