Problem Printing reports from Filemaker 4.1

[proton]

I designed a database solution for a company, which they use to generate a lot of reports. However, they say that the database is only printing 300 records and then stopping. The reports have a lot more than 300 records. It has 1520 records. They are printing from an IBM desktop system. Pentium III 550 Mhz, 63 Mb SDRAM, 10 GB hard disk drive, running Win 98. The printer is a Lexmark wide carriage, dot matrix, industrial strength printer. I went to diagnose it and printed and it printed 400 records fine (which was how much I sent as a test). I don't think the problem is Filemaker. Also, I want to know if sending that amount (1520) of records will cause windows to run low on resources and stop printing or something. Please help.

[Kurt Knippel]

quote:

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Originally posted by proton:

I designed a database solution for a company, which they use to generate a lot of reports. However, they say that the database is only printing 300 records and then stopping. The reports have a lot more than 300 records. It has 1520 records. They are printing from an IBM desktop system. Pentium III 550 Mhz, 63 Mb SDRAM, 10 GB hard disk drive, running Win 98. The printer is a Lexmark wide carriage, dot matrix, industrial strength printer. I went to diagnose it and printed and it printed 400 records fine (which was how much I sent as a test). I don't think the problem is Filemaker. Also, I want to know if sending that amount (1520) of records will cause windows to run low on resources and stop printing or something. Please help.

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I would start by diagnosing your client. Most often I find that FMP is printing exactly what they told it to. Most often what they told it was wrong.

Start by observing them in action, make sure that FMP is actually printing what they are asking it too.

Then either correct the user or the procedures for generating the reports.

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Kurt Knippel

Consultant

Database Resources

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.database-resources.com

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[proton]

captkurt,

I went and checked it today. They are printing it correctly. The report is very very long and takes up a lot of resources, and it appears that it is causing the computer to use up all it's resources. The printer was not installed correctly, so I fixed that. I generated a smaller report, which was only taking up 764 pages. However, when I sent it to print it only processed 576 pages, and sent those to print. I told it not to use the spool, but to send the output direct to the printer. It printed more than the usual 20 pages, but again it is limited to only 576 of the 764 pages. I came to realise that maybe it is a memory issue. The computer doesn't have enough memory. I'm thinking of recommending to them that they upgrade the machine to 128 Mb SDRAM or more. Hoping that ya'll can advise me if this is the right decision.