Vista - Render (Print) WPF visual to GDI+ Graphics object

Hi,

I'm researching how we will go about implementing printed/exported
reports for a possible new product.

We're likely to have some custom data presentation that uses WPF for
rendering, but the reporting frameworks I've been looking at use GDI+
for printing. We will want to render our WPF content into the middle
of their GDI+ graphics context, at as full fidelity as possible.

I guess we could always render the WPF content into a bitmap (at the
printer's resolution) and then render that into the GDI+ context, but
that seems like it's likely to use a lot of memory. Also I would
imagine we'll want to export the reports as PDF, etc as well, so
putting huge bitmaps in the middle could massively increase the file
size.

Any ideas?

James

P.S. Alternatively, does anyone know any reporting frameworks that use
the new XPS APIs for printing?

No ideas, but that's a good question hey!

On a second thought I have an idea..
based on no experience or knowledge of the API, just an idea to explore....

perhaps you could do the GDI+ printing to an XPS document, then open the XPS
document and render WPF content on it.

Then send this XPS document to the printer.....

On Jul 7, 1:13 pm, "Lloyd Dupont" <net.galador@ld> wrote:
> perhaps you could do the GDI+ printing to an XPS document, then open the XPS
> document and render WPF content on it.
>
> Then send this XPS document to the printer.....

Ouch. Nice hack! ;-)

Unfortunately, it would rather detract from the usefulness of using a
reporting framework (data-binding, export to HTML/PDF/Excel, etc), as
I'd have to go back through the document inserting content myself.

That makes me think about the export to Word/Excel situation,
actually. Has anyone found a way to render WPF content into a
metafile, or some other vector-based format that Office supports? I
guess that's sort of equivalent to my first question.

James

I have the same problem, but no solution so far.
I have found the class CGDIRenderTarget
(Microsoft.Internal.GDIExporter.CGDIRenderTarget), which would do the
job, but it is not accessible.

Matthias