{"id":9826,"date":"2014-04-08T08:14:42","date_gmt":"2014-04-08T15:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.xamarin.com\/?p=9826"},"modified":"2014-04-08T08:14:42","modified_gmt":"2014-04-08T15:14:42","slug":"native-printing-with-android","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/native-printing-with-android\/","title":{"rendered":"Native Printing with Android"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tThe latest version of Android, KitKat<\/a>, adds long-awaited printing support to the platform. Android applications can now provide low-level control of print jobs, in addition to print integration for applications incorporating web content. This makes KitKat particularly well-suited to hybrid applications built with Xamarin using Razor<\/a> templates.<\/p>\n

\"Android<\/p>\n

Printing with a WebView<\/h2>\n

First let’s look at the easy to use print support offered through the WebView<\/strong> control.<\/p>\n

Printing requires 3 steps:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. In an Activity, get a reference to the PrintManager<\/strong> system service.<\/li>\n
  2. Create an instance of a class that inherits from PrintDocumentAdapter<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  3. Call the PrintManager<\/strong>‘s Print<\/strong> method, passing it the print adapter.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The PrintDocumentAdapter<\/strong> is an abstract class that provides a contract to implement for supplying print content. For web content, the WebView<\/strong> class includes a PrintDocumentAdapter<\/strong>, making printing HTML from a WebView incredibly easy to do:<\/p>\n

    The following example shows a WebView<\/strong> built using the Android WebView template<\/em>, which uses Razor as an HTML templating engine:<\/p>\n

    \"Android<\/p>\n

    Although printing can be done using any WebView<\/strong>, integrating printing with Razor and this project template makes it really easy to build a hybrid application that can leverage native features such as KitKat printing.<\/p>\n

    Printing from the WebView<\/strong> with C# is as simple as adding these 2 lines of code in the activity:<\/p>\n

    \nvar printMgr = (PrintManager)GetSystemService(Context.PrintService);\nprintMgr.Print("Razor HMTL Hybrid", webView.CreatePrintDocumentAdapter(), null);\n<\/pre>\n
    When we call Print<\/strong> Android presents a system dialog, allowing the user to choose the print destination, as shown below:<\/p>\n
    \"Android<\/p>\n
    Custom Print Adapter<\/h2>\n
    To print from native Android views, taking low-level control of the print layout, we can implement our own PrintDocumentAdapter<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
    For example, let’s say we would like to print the layout from the following screen:<\/p>\n
    \"Android<\/p>\n
    In our implementation of PrintDocumentAdapter<\/strong>, the required methods to implement are:<\/p>\n