Detect if windows printer not responding

[Steve]

Hi All

I am using vb.net 2005 in a windows forms application

I send data to the selected windows printer using a PrintDocument object

Is there any way to detect if the Printer is not responding e.g turned off,
out of paper etc, via code

I want to display a warning if the printer needs attention rather than just
keep filling the Printer queue

Regards
Steve

[Linda Liu[MSFT]]

RE: Detect if windows printer not responding

Hi Steve,

The status of printers and print jobs are updated by the Win32 Spooler
during the de-spool of a print job. All other time, when that printer is
not de-spooling and reports no state information, the printer is considered
to be ready and idle. It means that if there's no print job in the print
queue, we have no way to get the real status of the physical printer.

To determine the state of a physical printer, there is one fundamental
premise that must be true: the Spooler must be attempting to send a print
job to the physical printer. This is the only time the state of the printer
is reported by the port monitor. In addition, the most meaningful
information may be reported in the status members of a JOB_INFO structure
for that particular print job because some port monitor will have set these
values directly.

For more information on how to get the status of a printer and a print job,
you may refer to the following KB article:
'How to get the status of a printer and a print job'

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/160129/en-us

Alternatively, we can use WMI to get the status of a print job. WMI allows
us to retrieve large amount of system information including print jobs
information using a query-like syntax. To retrieve the print status
information, we can query the Win32_PrintJob class. The following is a
sample. It requires that you add a reference to the System.Manageme nt
assembly to your project.

Imports System.Manageme nt

Dim oq As New.ObjectQuery ("SELECT * FROM Win32_PrintJob" ) '
Dim query1 As New ManagementObjec tSearcher(oq)
Dim queryCollection 1 As ManagementObjec tCollection = query1.Get()
Dim mo As Management.Mana gementObject
For Each mo In queryCollection 1
Console.WriteLi ne(("Printer Driver : " + mo("DriverName" ).ToString()))
Console.WriteLi ne(("Document Name : " + mo("Document"). ToString()))
Console.WriteLi ne(("Document Owner : " + mo("Owner").ToS tring()))

If (mo("JobStatus" ) IsNot Nothing) Then
Console.WriteLi ne(("Job Status : " + mo("JobStatus") .ToString()))
End If
Next mo

For more information about WMI and WIN32_PrintJob class, please refer to
the following MSDN documents:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394582(VS.85).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394370(VS.85).aspx

Hope this helps.
If you have any question, please feel free to let me know.

Sincerely,
Linda Liu
Microsoft Online Community Support

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