FedEx Shipping Labels

[orento]

I found that someone had actually gone ahead and finished the whole thing for the thermal labels and it works.

However....they are using the old API and not the Soap implementation that FedEx has now. The API creates a PNG which the client is complaining prints too slowly. (yes, they are driving me crazy).

The Soap implementation actually will return a data stream that should be routed directly to the COM port for the label printer....which I would think in theory would be just as fast as printing to the label printer from QuickBooks on the person's desktop for FedEx (which is what they want).

In the FedEx example they have the following as an example of how to print the thermal labels....but I believe that would open the COM port on the server instead of on the client and that doesn't work for what I'm trying to do.

`mode com1: BAUD=9600 PARITY=N data=8 stop=1 xon=off`;
$fp=fopen("COM1:", "w+");
if($fp)
{
     echo "Port not opened.";
} else {
     echo "Port opened.";
     fputs($fp, ( """"  the output from the soap response """"");
     fclose($fp);
}

I tried to save the data sent from FedEx to a file and then have the client print.....but it just comes out as text. I've never had to work with serial ports before and really have no clue what I'm doing. Somehow I need to trap the data that comes back and then pipe it directly to the printer on the client without having it change to text.

I am almost ready to make the client install xampp and then create a page that gets the saved data from the server and pushes it using the above code to the printer. What I may end up doing is creating a VB.Net desktop app that does just that. Haven't done any VB Desktop programming in a few years.....but at this point I'll try anything.

I've looked for a JavaScript solution as well and can't find anything. I could write an ActiveX control....but I think those only work on Win servers and this is a shared hosting account on a Unix server.


Any suggestions at this point will be ever so much appreciated.

Can I have your mod? Actually I have a thermal printer(LP2844) and I can test your mod. The file you get is an EPL2 formatted label, send it direct to thermal printer will do it.