Serialize Printer Settings

haag

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Oct 1, 2003

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An article on how to serialize PrinterSettings.

Introduction

It's very often to store user defined printer settings to disk, to get it later back from the disk. In the framework there is a class called PrinterSettings to manipulate the settings which are chosen by the printer dialog. In the framework 1.1 there is no way to serialize the PrinterSettings and store it to the disk. I think it's a bug in the framework?

Background

In some newsgroups there is always the same question, how can I store PrinterSettings in .NET. Now I tried different ways to do that, but I hope the best one is presented here. Its a mix of managed and unmanaged code. If you try to serialize the PrinterSettings object in the framework there appears always a serialization exception.

Using the code

The main class is clsPrinterSettings. In that class we will do the handling to serialize the class and the object.

There are three methods and two structures. The first method is public void setPrinterSettings(PrinterSettings settings), this method stores the settings object in the class. After you choose that method, you can serialize the clsPrinterSettings with normal .NET mechanisms. If you want to get back the settings next time, first you have to de-serialize the clsPrinterSettings and call the second method public PrinterSettings getPrinterSettings(), you get back the restored PrinterSettings object. The third method is private, because it's used to initialize a new PrinterSettings object in the clsPrinterSettings. That object is declared in the class as NonSerialized(). If you don't do that, you get a serialization exception. The two structures are to store the Hdevmodes and the Hdevnames in the structures.

Using the clsPrinterSettings

Declaration of the classes is as shown below. The clsPrinterSettings is responsible to serialize the settings of the PrtSettings object.

//Declarations 
private clsPrinterSettings printSet = new clsPrinterSettings();
private BinaryFormatter serializer = new  BinaryFormatter();
private PrintDialog printer = new PrintDialog();
private PrinterSettings PrtSettings = new  PrinterSettings();

Check if a serialized file exists. If exists, de-serialize it and assign it to the PrtSettings object.

//If printersettings exists then read it from the file
if (File.Exists(sFilePrinterSet)){

    //Deserialise and assigning
    Stream Stream2 = File.Open(sFilePrinterSet, FileMode.Open);
    printSet = (clsPrinterSettings) serializer.Deserialize(Stream2);
    Stream2.Close();
    PrtSettings = printSet.getPrinterSettings();
}
//If printersettings not exists
else{
    PrtSettings.PrinterName = txtSelPrinter.Text;
}

Assign the PrtSettings object to the Printer.PrinterSettings property and show the dialog.

// Filling the PrinterDialog with the printer settings
printer.PrinterSettings = PrtSettings;
printer.ShowDialog();

Serialize the printSet object after you assigned the new settings

//assign the printersettings to the serialising class 
printSet.setPrinterSettings(PrtSettings); 
 //serialise the serializing class 
Stream Stream1 = File.Open(sFilePrinterSet, FileMode.Create);
serializer.Serialize(Stream1,printSet);
Stream1.Close();

History

2003-09-28 Version 1.0