Batch print InfoPath Forms using the PDF Converter for SharePoint

Posted at: 17:40 on 01 December 2009 by Muhimbi

printer We were recently contacted by a customer who uses our PDF Converter for SharePoint as a workaround for the lack of batch printing support in InfoPath. Their business case was somewhat unusual as they had to print thousands of InfoPath forms that were sitting in a document library and then ship these documents off-site.

Under normal circumstances, e.g. when using MS-Word documents, you can simply select a number of documents using Windows File Explorer, right click and select the Print option from the context menu. InfoPath, however, does not support this Print context menu.

Fortunately PDF files can be printed in batch using the Print context menu, so some clever boffin came up with the idea to use our product to convert an InfoPath form to PDF format as soon as it is posted to the Forms Library. They would then periodically copy the PDF files to a local system and batch print them.

This is very simple to achieve using a SharePoint Designer workflow. We have blogged about this before, but in summary this is how you can make it work.

  1. Download and install the PDF Converter for SharePoint.
     
  2. If not already installed, download and install the free SharePoint Designer,
     
  3. Create a simple SharePoint Designer workflow to automatically convert any new or updated document in a library to PDF format as described in this posting.
     

    workflow2

  4. Periodically copy a batch of converted PDF files from SharePoint to your local drive using a Library’s Actions / Open with Windows Explorer menu.
     
  5. Select the batch of PDF files on your local system, right-click on one of the files and select the Print option.
     

That’s it. A workaround, but a pretty good one if you need it.

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4 Comments:

  • where does this "PDF Converter" has to be installed? on developer machine or customer machine?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At 25 February, 2010 18:45  

  • This Converter is a central service that you would typically install on a server. Most of our customers use it in combination with SharePoint.

    If you have any specific questions or need for assistance then please mail support@muhimbi.com.

    By Blogger Jeroen Ritmeijer, At 25 February, 2010 19:30  

  • Hi, we do need to do batch convert too, but our situation is a bit different:

    1) Both InfoPath form template and filled forms are in SharePoint 2007 form library;
    2) We have tens of thousands of SharePoint sites and form libraries, and more than 1M filled forms, so we have to do batch processing;
    3) The SharePoint system is considered fragile, and thus no wsp can be deployed to it. Only read only access is allowed;
    4) We'd like to install your Windows Service (together with the Web Service) to a separate server, and write some PowerShell script to go through all the InfoPath form libraries, generate PDF for each filled form, and write PDF to file system (not another SharePoint library).

    I am not sure if the above is achieveable, can you please help?

    By Blogger Stanley, At 29 January, 2015 19:20  

  • Hi Stanley,

    What you are asking is certainly possible. Please drop support@muhimbi.com a line and we'll help you out.

    By Blogger Muhimbi, At 30 January, 2015 09:56  

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