SendFileToPrint API, 2 questions

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R Robert Hood 2 years 11 months ago
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Hello,
I'm relatively new to the forum, so if these questions have already been asked, please do point me in the right direction of the answers. I have two questions regarding printing remotely with the cloud api:
1) I saw that the old beta service was discontinued on 9/15/2020, and that the new SendFileToPrinter API is intended to take its place. The old api offered a way to get printer status, which I saw the new api seems to lack. Was it intended that this feature should be retired, or is this slated for perhaps a future release? Being able to remotely see a printer's status is of interest to my project team.
2) I successfully completed the zebra sandbox tutorial exercise to print the hello world label to a printer. During my attempt to replicate this for my project manager, I again successfully invoked the cloud api and received a success message, but looked down to find that I had beforehand switched off my printer. We were confused by the ostensible contradiction. When I later turned the printer on, no label was created. Should I infer that the success message indicated only that the call was successfully processed, or that the job was queued but aged out of the system before the printer's connection was restored by turning it back on, or is this perhaps a bug in the API? The interpretation of the intended reply to my print request will have an impact on how the project takes shape around it.
Thanks much in advance for your help!
Robert

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2 Replies

S Steven Si

Hi Robert,
Let me try to answer your questions.
1. The discontinued service were built as a sandbox for the proof-of-concept. The SendFileToPrinter API is the replacement for that as a product, however this API is unidirectional. In the next phase, we will add a printer status API, so the application will be able to check on the printer status.
2. The successful message from the SendFileToPrinter API is an indication of the successful calling on this API. It doesn't indicate whether the content has been delivered or not. If the printer is offline when calling this API, the content will be queued until the printer comes back online and reconnects to the cloud next time.
If there is nothing printed out after turning on the printer, it could be that we didn't wait long enough for the printer to re-connect to the Zebra Data Service cloud, or the content was ignored by the printer due to incorrect settings on the printer, or the printer is registered with a different tenant ID, etc. These are the conditions to look into to figure out why.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Steven Si

C Christine Wall

is there any update (18-Sep-2021) about an API service to know the status of a printer and its jobs?

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