Online Food Ordering (Printing Automatically)

[Guest]

Hello,

Everyone I am designing a project for online food ordering and have developed a prototype in CFMX but I am trying to get my head around this one part which is the clients want when a new order comes in it automatically print to a designated printer. I can't really see how to do this other than installing some kind of client App on the computer that while host this printer and have it print somehow. I am looking for suggestions on what who you do or what do you know actually works for places that offer this service.

My ideas were to

Have a screen display the new order on a monitor but have the order displayed by using a webpage that refreshes every say 15 seconds and will pop the new order up on the screen and have them print it manually. This is all cool but they want it to be printed automatically

Have a designated e-mail account setup and when a new order comes in the web app will send the order to this e-mail address but then I got stuck on how to get it to print automatically.

Any Ideas,

Thanks in advance

[JR__Bob__Dobbs-qSBHQ2]

With CF 8 you could use the CFPRINT tag.

For earlier versions of CF you might generate a text file then print it from a command line utility via CFEXECUTE.

To generate a fax you might use InterFax, http://www.interfax.net

[Guest]

How do you suggest using the CFPRINT Tag, because just thinking about it, it seems more suitable to for say teh customer after they are done to automatically print to thier default printer but to be able to have that order printed automatically some where else(like at the store) when a order comes in, that is what I am unsure about. The Fax option definately looks like I can use that out of the box but does it require you to know languages other than CF? I know a little PHP and .NET can this only be done using these languages?

Thanks for your help that has been really helpful

[Guest]

Oh thanks I found the answer about the Fax: http://www.interfax.net/en/dev/coldfusion.html

[JR__Bob__Dobbs-qSBHQ2]

Are you trying to print at the office where the server is located or on the PC where the end user is located? If you trying to print at the end user's browser you will need to rely on Javascript (since CF operates on the server side).

Regarding Interfax they have both a web service API and email API, either of which can be used with CF.

[Guest]

Yea I am trying to print at the store, so, the customer will place an order from thier PC then teh order gets sent to the store and printed there automatically. The fax will work and I saw an option with http://www.interfax.net where you can specify an e-mail address with the fax as the address and it will be sent to the fax. I am still thinking about the printing at the store though.

I am thinking I could setup a e-mail account for the company, then use a print software that plugs into to outlook to print every new message that comes in. I saw some plug-ins for outlook for like $39 such as Print Message for Outlook 2.00, Print Tools for Outlook 1.7.6 and Automatic Print Email 2.07 . I rather a development solution but well see. I want to have others weigh in and see what there thoughts are because the suggestion you gave me was very good.

[Dan_Bracuk]

I've actually done this. I wrote a batch file that used windows print and then used cfexecute.

I could have used cfexecute with windows print, but I had trouble with the syntax for the printer.

If you want to print to the default printer in the store, you can have your batch file call notepad in the minimized state and do it that way.

I think my google search string was "automatic windows print" or something like that.