Cory

An excellent suggestion Terry. A common application would make it easy for us to help. I could also give better instructions on how to make multiple virtual printers for the same physical printer to facilitate different default settings.

I don't know how to change a date parameter in CR, but I imagine you open up some dialog box and change a value then close it. I would do this with MEP's Windows Control commands. Click the button, wait for the control to exist, enter a value in the control, send a click to the "OK button" control. Something like that. But are you sure you can't save a separate copy report with that 120 day plus value? If you can, that would make things simpler. There's a good tutorial of how to use controls in the sample macros I think. It uses Windows Calculator.

There are many companies that do this sort of thing. You might consider doing a search and checking them out. Also have you asked SAP SE or the CR community if there's a way to automate natively with CR? What about these guys? They show a demo of printing on a schedule. Just some additional thoughts. I'm sure you can do it with MEP too.

Please read my messages more carefully and think about how they apply to your condition. 1) I suggested you open CR report viewer with a parameter for the report you want. Notepad is an example attached of opening a file named test.txt. This is simpler than doing a file-open routine and I would want to try this first. Also if you have a file association for rpt, you can simply put the document name in the program/path name. I.E. if you can double click on the file in Windows and it opens, this will work. Then close the program after printing that report if needed. 2) I explained I would change the default printer with MEP then change it back when done. 3) Create a duplicate of the printer and set all the settings you need as defaults. Doing so only affects that virtual printer. So like LaserJet5500, LaserJer5500-doubleSided, and so forth. You can change printer settings in MEP also, but it's more code and time and more possibility of having a problem. Are you creating report templates or running reports with the viewer?

Text Type Ctrl+P would be my guess, but I haven't printed anything from Crystal in a dozen years or more. In MEP it's best to use keyboard shortcuts or Windows controls. According to this page, Ctrl+P should start the print process.

I've not used it. I know there are authentication settings that need to be made. Contact their support.

I forgot to add that if the report viewer doesn't remember the last used printer, you can use MEP to change the default printer to the custom configured one then change it back.

I found this also. $150 and you're done. Another trick to consider is to set up a printer in Windows for these reports with their defaults configured for your reports. That way when you print to it, you don't need to change any print parameters. I see one can generate reports, but I don't see any support for printing from the command line. In that case I'd have CR create the RPT files as I mentioned in my first post and then open the Report Viewer passing the RPT file in the command parameters with MEP. That way you avoid the whole "File open..." part. Then just have MEP do a CTRL+P to print. I think the last selected printer is remembered and you can simply click OK on the button control.

You might not need MEP. I believe CR has command line properties that allow one to do many things including running reports. I would first look and see if that's the case and if so, use the Windows Scheduler to schedule the task every morning. If there's no option to directly print, you could create a report file in a batch file and then send it to the printer.

FYI MEP can't access web form controls. The only control is the entire rendered area. I like to F6 and evaluate the URI. Maybe it contains something like "myaccounts" in the path or you can use the entire URI. Or there could be parameters in the query that can be used.

Use the Catch Error command. In the Set Focus command you will see an "On Error" tab and the code for that error is 0x0028. I try to avoid Catch Error commands. I think it's better to test first with If If Control > Exists. You might also take care in how you do your Get Control command if you can see the control you want, but MEP doesn't see it. There are some technicalities one must understand in order to get this to work in some cases. The main part is MEP accesses controls by an address, and just because you see a blue 2020 Honda Civic and it looks like all the rest, the DMV sees them as distinct because they have different VINs.

I suspect your "Challenges" are really you just getting people to write macros for you. 🙂 Anyway, Tom Sawyer, I wrote a macro for this ages ago and I was just working with Terry on it. I don't like how many people want to dive into the GUI on something like this, it's just a mess. It's much easier to export the macro information to a file and process the text file. Search and report on macro text.mex

If I knew, I certainly wouldn't announce it to the world in a public forum for anyone can view and use such information to circumvent licensing. ISS are good people and they deserve to be compensated for such a useful product.

You probably know this but you can also use the Win+Tab to get to the task/timeline view where you can assign apps to desktops, switch desktops, and such.

If you are active in the application, have you considered closing it by using it's commands? Or have you considered using the Windows keyboard shortcut Alt+F4. That is the same as clicking the X in the upper right of a WinForm.

Ever since floppies went out of style I've used my A and B letters. I will always make my OS drive C because eventually I'll find someone who assumes that the OS drive is C in their software, but my main data drive is A. Why would you want to forsake A and B? Bob you might try running MEP with admin privileges. In a few cases I've had to resort to using TaskKill. You might want to check it out. I hope you get MEP to work first, but in the event it doesn't this works well.

I'm glad that helped. Every day's a good day, here above ground. Good to see you alive and kicking also.

One of the first things I do with a new program macro is research all the keyboard shortcuts. Also Command line options and import/export options. Often you can enter a lot of data that way without a complex macro but still use MEP to generate an import file or process an export.

Make sure you open your "Macro Express Pro - Explorer" and expand the categories and check in each category for macros. You can also check the last run time column to see which it is if it was misnamed. Send a screenshot of this window if you can't find your macro.

I learned some programming back in the 80's but lost it as I entered my career as a mechanical product designer. Many years ago I got into using MEP and it was an easy way to get into some automation. I started getting a lot of work making huge macros doing some real heavy lifting. But keeping them running and dealing with timing and other issues became a nightmare. I looked online to see how others did it and started writing simple helper scripts in VBScript and then I realized I really just needed to get back into proper programming. Let me tell you... Once I learned VB.NET and made my first simple scraper I slapped myself around for a week. It was so much simpler and many orders of magnitude faster and robust. I think many people are like me and use MEP for simple user one-off operations, then start trying to do really big things with it. This is a mistake. At this point one needs to learn a proper programming language and there are so many easy ones out there. .NET is astronomically more capable than MEP. Really wanting MEP to be more like a proper programming language is wrong. If you need that, then go on to an extant programming language. It's easier than you think. MEP should stay like it is and it's functions should only be for the user efficiency macros. E.G. I don't want to ever see MEP get database commands. It's a brilliant program and I'd rather it stay simple and useful for non-programmers.

You're welcome. It's relatively new.

Just a couple quick ideas. I am not familiar with CintaNotes, but I looked online and found that you can change this behavior with a configuration option. Help file explains it here. Another thought I had is that you could end the process before launching.

BTW Tesseract OCR worked well for me. Also Omnipage. And I have used free online OCR engines, however I would never use those for sensitive data.

What's your question?

If you mean using generic macros as functions or subroutines, of course I have. I try not to write any code twice.