I am working on a quite big eWeb tool which includes lots of .js & .php files and this tool is developed by someone else that I can not reach.
Assume that a customer buys some stuff and at the end, as a seller, I am supposed to confirm the customer's shopping by clicking the 'confirm order' button in some table. Now, I want to print a PDF file (which is either located in my local disk or on the server of the eWeb tool depends on the difficulty) when I click the confirm button. I can reach the printer and print the PDF file by following PHP code in my localhost when I directly call it:
<?php
$printer ="HP Officejet Pro X476dw MFP PCL 6 (Network)";
$path = "C:/Test_PDF/TestPDF.pdf";
$fileName = "TestPDF.pdf";`
if($ph = printer_open($printer)) {
$filecontents = file_get_contents($path);
printer_set_option($ph, PRINTER_MODE, "RAW");
printer_write($ph, $filecontents);
printer_close($ph);
}
?>
Now, what I want is to print the PDF file also from the web tool when I click the 'confirm order' button! I do not want to load the PDF file in a hidden iframe or embed it somewhere because, as I said before, the tool is quite big and I do not want to cause any problem somewhere else for now.
Can anybody give me some ideas about the solutions please?
Assuming that PHP is a server-side language, as some people said before, you can't send a print request to a client. The request is originated in the server, so...
What you can do:
1.- Load the pdf in the webpage.
2.- Handle the body onLoad as follows:
<body onload="window.print();">
That way the client will use it's printer if any.
I know that you don't want to load the pdf in a webpage but... This seems like the only solution.
P.D.: I'm not sure if you want to print the receipt for the customer or the seller. Explain yourself better and I will try to help you :)