Virtual Printer Tutorials: Collecting multiple documents

 

In the first tutorial we created a simple client application. It could only parse virtual printer ini file - nothing more - but this was a required step in the virtual printer's documents processing pipeline. So, we're ready to move on.

In the next tutorials we'll create a more powerful client which will be able to collect files from multiple printed documents into collection and transfer them in a zip archive to a remote machine using ftp or http protocols.

Please take a look at our tutorials roadmap:

Now we'll implement Part II.

First of all, we need to decide where to store collected files from the virtual printer. The C:\.....Local Settings\Application Data is a good place for them.

Next question: How do we track file names ? Virtual printer files can be named identically. Of course, we could write some function which would scan the target directory for a file name coincidence, but since virtual printer file names do not contain any valuable information, there is no reason to do it this way. Instead, we will use Globally Unique Identifier, or GUID, for the file names in the collection. Since each new GUID is unique, there is no need to track actual file names! (Simpler code is more reliable).

How do we store information about the collection ? There are many ways - XML, text files and so on. But, since the virtual printer stores document information in the INI file, it's convenient to use the same format. We can use existing code to read information from the collection.

Implementation details are described on the next page.