Printer selection in Access 97

[akhosravi4703]

I'm having a problem with an application I pushed out recently.

First, some background

The application was made with Access 97 (unfortunately I'm stuck with
this older version for the moment)
The app is compiled into an MDE on a network drive from which several
users access it in one location
I'm an entry-level programmer, so please frame your answers for less
experienced =)

The problem:
Users need to be able to select the printer they want their output to
go through as well as set some other print options for their print
jobs. Using the default printer is not sufficient for this as the
reports they print off from my application contain sensitive
information that needs to be handled differently from the normal print
jobs they do.

It's easy enough to allow for a user to select their printer by
adding the 'page format' button to the report toolbar. The problem
with this is that when one user changes the printer, it saves the last
printer they used when they exit the application. Any user who logs in
later will be printing to the last printer the other user selected by
default. In addition, users get nasty error messages when two users are
trying to change printer options on the same report at the same time.

I know of only 2 ways to fix this for sure, and neither of these is
very good.

I could split the app keeping the tables on the network drive, and
distribute the front end of the application to each user. Each user
would then have their own print options saved to their individual
copies of the app. The problem here is that the only method I have to
distribute updates (and there will be many updates) is through e-mail.
Users would constantly be hassling with making sure their client side
version was the up to date version.

I could require the user to change their default printer settings
before they log into the application. This is a pain for obvious
reasons.

I was also thinking that it might be possible to reset the app to print
to 'client default' after every print job rather than saving the
specific printer the last user printed to. The problem here is that I
have no idea how to do that programmaticall y. I've read some things
about prtdevnames and prtdevmode. However, the articles I've read
about this seem to be geared more towards preserving a legal size
document print size rather than selecting specific printers.

I'm wondering if any of you know how to do this, OR if any of you
have a better way to deal with this situation.

Thanks in advance any responses!

[jimfortune]

Albert Kallal wrote some A97 code for dealing with printer selection.
Perhaps he has what you need here:

http://www.members.shaw.ca/AlbertKal.../msaccess.html

James A. Fortune