Printers
Types of Printers
Oracle WMS Cloud supports four types of printers/printing options:
- Label Printers: Oracle WMS supports the Zebra Printing Language, ZPL. Printers manufactured by Zebra as well as many other companies that support the ZPL printing language should work. The client is required to test it and verify that label printing works as expected. Some typical models in use by current clients are Zebra / ZM400, Zebra 105SL, INTERMEC /PD42. This application prints to label printers at client locations via network access that must be configured as described in the network configuration section below. These printers must be configured in the Oracle WMS application.
- Laser printers for reports:Report documents are typically generated as a PDF by the Oracle WMS application desktop web interface and can be printed to a local printer by the user. As such these printers typically do not need to be configured in the Oracle WMS application. If the ability to print certain PDF documents from the handheld RF interface is used, then laser printers also need to be setup in the application and accessed by the Oracle WMS application over the network similar to label printers.
- GDD Printers:These are dot matrix or line matrix printers that use the ESCP printing language. We have a GDD.txt that serves as a template and we generate the actual file to be printed based on this, (somewhat like the .lbl template) and then printed from the server via lp, just like for label printers. GDD printers also have to be defined on the server. These must be setup as network accessible printers similar to laser printers. Some sample models used by current clients are PRINTRONIX/P7220, EPSON / DFX 9000, EPSON / FX890, OKI/Pacemark 4410.
- Print to Email Address: You have the option to print to an email address. To set this up, configure the printer in the Printer screen with protocol (mailto) , domain / IP (John.doe@mail.com). Then in the User Config screen, in the Default Printer section (email: John.doe@mail.com). Next, log out and login and you should be able to print labels as emails.
Configuring Printers in the Printer UI
To configure Printers from the Printer UI, complete the following steps:
- From the Printer UI, click Create.
- Select the printer type (DOCUMENT, ZEB, ESCP.)
- Add the printer name.
- Add the description name.
- Choose the printer protocol (lpd, socket.)
- Add the domain_or_ip with printers IP.
- Add the port field.
- Add the printer_queue_name field, same as printer name.
- Click Save.
You need to configure Primary and Secondary IPs for your instance (PRODUCTION, PREPRODUCTION, UAT). These are provided by the Oracle WMS Cloud team.
For example:
Environment Primary IP Secondary IP
Client UAT 52.5.169.40 52.70.62.135
The IP addresses 52.5.169.40 and 52.70.62.135 are Oracle Cloud-WMS print servers. When you print a label from Oracle WMS Cloud, the print job leaves our cloud servers from these IP addresses to reach customer printers in a warehouse. Customer networks and more specifically firewalls need to make sure they can accept traffic from above two Oracle Cloud-WMS IPs.
Make sure you are allowing traffic within your firewall from these two IPs on a specific port. Those ports are customer defined. Default ports used are 9100 or 515 but they are controlled by the customer printer or print server configuration.
Additional Notes
- In case the Oracle WMS Cloud Print screen shows that the label printer status is ok but nothing gets printed, make sure that Oracle Cloud WMS Printer screen has the same protocol selected for the affected printer as configured on the customer print/print-server. If it does not match, you will see the behavior that nothing gets printed. If your physical printer/print-server is configured as LPD in the Oracle WMS Cloud Print screen, select the affected printer and make sure that the protocol is selected as LPD. The other protocol that is supported is Socket/Raw. Please make sure both ends match the protocol to avoid printing issues.
- Print Servers: We recommend that you use a print server to manage printers that the Oracle WMS application needs to access. Printers connected to an external dedicated print server (typically a Windows Server or a Linux Server) are more robust and can handle larger volumes of labels. Printers that use a built in print server (network card or dongle) may have trouble with higher volumes and may have issues with lost labels or repeated labels etc. Based on the expected volume and type of use the right choice must be made. For example, if you are going to routinely print dozens or hundreds of label at a time from the wave, they should have a dedicated print server to avoid problems. In addition, print servers avoid the need to have multiple public IP addresses for printers.
- Take into consideration that the print service is not encrypted.