Printing labels with multiple printers

[Alex9779]

First of all I wanna thank you and I like the way Inventree develops. Combined with some other OpenSource tools this allows me to run my small business without huge license costs and I also like to be able contribute where possible.

I see the technical needs of replacing certain methods and making the core more flexible so I advocate the changes in the label printing system towards a machine based management.

Though I am missing one thing I hacked into the previous implemention and I see no solution at the moment for my needs nor I see them on the horizon.
What I mean is the possibilty to have a label bound to a printer or fix its orientation.
With the new system printers are machines and the orientation is bound to a machine.
So now it is much more easy to have multiple printers but I have to know which label to print on which printer. And that is pretty annoying.
Just image I have three printers with three different formats, one for stock locations, one for big item labels and the other for small item and product labels. So I named all the labels with their size and the printers also but I always have to choose the right combination. That's just annoying.

Thinking a bit further if you do not work alone, you have to tell everyone how this works and they have to select the right combination, which I really don't like. I'd rather set this up one time and it is always right...

Do I miss something, is that possible and I just don't see it?

Cheers
Alexander

[wolflu05]

Hi, this is definitely a valid request. I already had something similar in mind (that's why I already added access to the template and items here, but seems that @matmair has removed this https://github.com/inventree/InvenTree/blob/master/src/backend/InvenTree/plugin/builtin/labels/inventree_machine.py#L116-L117 )

Unfortunately I don't have any time currently to implement this. But I can share some ideas I had. I personally see two ways of doing this:

1. add a concept of printing profiles. Then each label and machine can select the different profiles. By default there is a default profile which is assigned to every printer and label if nothing else is specified. But admins can manually assign profiles to a printer and label to limit the available printers when printing a specific template
2. idea one may be to complex, maybe a simple selection of printers for each template or the other way around (selection of templates for each printer) may be sufficient. However this has limited flexibility, e.g. when a user has like 5 printers that can print stock location labels, and a new template is created, all other 5 printers need to be selected again for that template. (Same applies for the other way around, when a new printer is created, all templates need to be selecte.)

Feel free to discuss the implementation idea here. And if by any chance you have some time, feel free to contribute.

[Alex9779]

Time: a bit
Will: a lot
Knowledge: none

I think the profile idea is really complex and adding new stuff could get annoying and error-prone.
I think the second is more than enough, at best both ways could be provided, select printers a label can be printed on or labels a printer can print.
I am just thinking of use cases, how thing happen in practice.
If you setup the system you have to deal with a lot of stuff and so you gotta set this up too if you need it.
If you have a running system and do one of the two things (add a new template or add a new printer) you have to think what makes sense. If that setting is not bound to either object but if you select it at one side it will be set on the other too.

From my point of view labels are very specific. If you have multi size labels configured you either have one printer with different spools you switch depending on the task you are doing or you have multiple printers.

So for one printer with different spools if just the size is different you normally won't use that because the size is a template setting too and if that does not fit the printer it won't print, at least my Brother does that so.
A different kind of thing is the orientation. This is now a setting of the printer but you can have labels using the same spool size but different orientations.
If you have multiple printers you will definitely need this.

But as written above, I am not sure where to start, how to extend the scheme and the UI.

In the old system is used the "plugin metadata" filled with some JSON and extended the printing function to parse this and replace default printer settings if that field had those properties overwritten. That was pretty easy and just some lines of code just using what was already there...

[SergeoLacruz]

We use one printer (Zebra) for each label size because changing the spools is time consuming and puzzles the users. Actually we have three in a row. That's why I added the printer name in the template metadata. There will be a printer overview soon.
Thats fine as long as there is just one printer for one size. In case you have several printers for one size at several locations in a bigger building things are getting complicated. I that case the user needs to have the selection where the label should appear. This leads to labels accidentally printed on the wrong printer.

[wolflu05]

That’s where the second concept I tried to establish jumps in, but I haven’t finished/finedtuned it. Each printer can be assigned a specific location already. There is just a mechanism missing which determines where the user actually is and filter/sort the printers accordingly.