Nonintegrated Printing

If your application does not integrate printing with the desktop, users must open your application to properly print data files.

Nevertheless, you should provide a print action that runs when users drop your application's data files on a printer drop zone. Otherwise, the desktop may assume that the file contains text data, and the print output will be garbled.

The desktop provides a print action for this purpose named NoPrint. The NoPrint action displays a dialog box telling users that the data files cannot be printed using the printer drop zones.

The NoPrint action displays the Unable to Print dialog box shown in Figure 1-1 .

Figure 1-1 Dialog box displayed by the built-in NoPrint action

To use the Unable to Print dialog box, create a print action specific to your data type that maps to the NoPrint action. For example, suppose the data type for your application is:

DATA_ATTRIBUTES MySpreadSheet_Data1
{
		-- 
}

The following Print action maps to the NoPrint for this data type:

ACTION Print
{
		ARG_TYPE				MySpreadSheet_Data1
 	TYPE					MAP
 	MAP_ACTION			NoPrint
}