Printing grids with Ext JS
July 26, 2009 by Ed Spencer · 25 Comments
Grids are one of the most widely used components in Ext JS, and often represent data that the user would like to print. As the grid is usually part of a wider application, simply printing the page isn’t often a good solution.
You could attach a stylesheet with media=”print”, which hides all of the other items on the page, though this is rather application-specific, and a pain to update. It would be far better to have a reusable way of printing the data from any grid.
The way I went about this was to open up a new window, build a table containing the grid data into the new window, then print it and close. It’s actually pretty simple, and with a bit of CSS we can even get the printable view looking like it does in the grid.
Here’s how you use it (this is a slightly modified version of the Array Grid Example):
var grid = new Ext.grid.GridPanel({
store : store,
columns: [
{header: "Company", width: 160, dataIndex: 'company'},
{header: "Price", width: 75, dataIndex: 'price', renderer: 'usMoney'},
{header: "Change", width: 75, dataIndex: 'change'},
{header: "% Change", width: 75, dataIndex: 'pctChange'}
{header: "Last Updated", width: 85, dataIndex: 'lastChange', renderer: Ext.util.Format.dateRenderer('m/d/Y')}
],
title:'Array Grid',
tbar : [
{
text : 'Print',
iconCls: 'print',
handler: function() {
Ext.ux.GridPrinter.print(grid);
}
}
]
});
So we’ve just set up a simple grid with a print button in the top toolbar. The button just calls Ext.ux.GridPrinter.print, which does all the rest. The full source code that this example was based upon can be found at http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/grid/array-grid.js.
The source for the extension itself is pretty simple (download it here):
If you look at the source above you’ll see it includes a ‘print.css’ stylesheet, which can be used to style the printable markup. The GridPrinter expects this stylesheet to be available at /stylesheets/print.css, but this is easy to change:
//add this before you call Ext.ux.GridPrinter.print Ext.ux.GridPrinter.stylesheetPath = '/some/other/path/gridPrint.css';
Finally, here is some CSS I’ve used to achieve a grid-like display on the printable page:
html,body,div,dl,dt,dd,ul,ol,li,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,pre,form,fieldset,input,p,blockquote,th,td{margin:0;padding:0;}
img,body,html{border:0;}
address,caption,cite,code,dfn,em,strong,th,var{font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;}
ol,ul {list-style:none;}caption,th {text-align:left;}h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-size:100%;}q:before,q:after{content:'';}
table {
width: 100%;
text-align: left;
font-size: 11px;
font-family: arial;
border-collapse: collapse;
}
table th {
padding: 4px 3px 4px 5px;
border: 1px solid #d0d0d0;
border-left-color: #eee;
background-color: #ededed;
}
table td {
padding: 4px 3px 4px 5px;
border-style: none solid solid;
border-width: 1px;
border-color: #ededed;
}
This technique could easily be adapted to print any component that uses a store – DataViews, ComboBoxes, Charts – whatever. It just requires changing the generated markup and stylesheet.
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Software Architect at Sencha Inc where I lead the development of Ext JS and supporting projects. A longtime lover of JavaScript and related geekery, currently living in Palo Alto.
Nice work Ed.
Excellent work and happy birthday!
Thanks for this extremely useful bit of code!
Excellent work!
I was looking for something like this and it is perfect!
Excellent work! Спасибо, подрочил!
Thanks for the code , but i get the following error
grid.getColumnModel() is not a function
How can i fix this ? thanks in advance
This script works flawlessly using Firefox 3 – Explorer 7 however gives me a new window for the briefest time and the the new window simply vanishes and no print dialogue is ever presented. Tried setting the options for a “open popups in new tab” but didn’t change anything. Any ideas what is happening (other than good old microsoft strikes again….?) Thanks a million.
I need to pass some parameters over to print. How can I do so? Thank you.
This script works great, however I noticed a subtle bug in firefox if you would want to open a print view that does not print the document immediately. (ie remove calls to win.print() and win.close()) Firefox will continue to “loading” the page indefinitely. In order to correct add:
…
win.document.write(html);
win.document.close();
…
The printer friendly table always shows all the columns in the store, even though if they were hidden, how can I show only the visible columns?
@Dan
If you want the new window/tab to not close immediately then you can remove the following line:
win.close()
Excellent work!, Thanks for the code.
but what about if the grid has a paging toolbar ?
this scripts only prints the data in the active page.
any idea?
maybe reloading the store without any limit,start parameter ??
cheers!
For those that were having trouble with IE, I think the following changes fix this issue.
1. Move the print trigger to the onload():
”,
remove:
win.print();
2. Change the:
win.close();
to
win.document.close();
as suggested by another commenter.
win.print() doesn’t seem to work in IE for a dynamically created document, and the win.document.close() is essential for the onLoad event to work in IE. This solution does not end up automatically closing the window after printing, but I prefer that behavior.
I’m not sure what happened to the onLoad line in my earlier comment, basically you want to call window.print() from the body tag of the generated HTML.
I’ve updated the Github gist with the window.document.close() as suggested by Dan and Alan. I suggest you check out Ext.ux.Printer instead though as it’s a more comprehensive plugin that can be applied to any component (see http://edspencer.net/2009/07/extuxprinter-printing-for-any-ext.html)
I’ve tried both of your grid printing solutions and I have the same issue with both. I get the grid headers but no rows on the printout. I must be missing something. Thanks!!!
HI,
Nice work! Just a thing: in the link to the source code, this:
” + grid.title + ”,
is this:
” + grid.getTitle() + ”,
no big deal =)
Hi “Ben” I think I have solved your problem with the rows not appearing, are you using ajax data?
If so, the grid is being sent to print before the data store has gotten the data, to fix this issue you can do the following:
ds.load();
ds.on({
‘load’:{
fn: function(store, records, options){
Ext.ux.Printer.print(grid);
},scope:this
}
});
This basically waits for the datastore to load and then runs the print option.
Hi Ed Spencer,
Am new to this but its really work and excellent. I have few inquiry, what if the grid has pagination. Where i want to print all the pages in the grid panel. As i tested the scripts only print the active page or the selected page. Any Idea how to do this?
Thank you so much for all your favorable action taken.
@easy you’d need to either load all of the records first (set the pageSize to a very high number), or programmatically load each page and print it. The first solution is obviously better.
Thanks for the reply Ed Spencer… Actually am still new to EXTJS, Is it possible if u can help me how to do with the first solution. Just a draft script.. if possible. Thank you so much.
Great stuff!! Thank you for sharing this wonderful piece of code.
You can also bring in the same styling from extjs grid to this print friendly table by changing
bodyTpl: new Ext.XTemplate(
”,
”,
‘\{{dataIndex}\}’,
”,
”
)
to
bodyTpl: new Ext.XTemplate(
”,
”,
‘\{{dataIndex}\}’,
”,
”
)
Don’t forget to add the css class to thie print friendly page.
I use this for aligning text.
One problem I have, is that I want to retrieve css class from each row which I assigned from ‘getRowClass’, but I am out of luck. Any idea?
Oops, that looks weird. I don’t usually write codes in blogs so forgive me for that.
Bottom line of my tip is to add class=”{id}” to <td> in the bodyTpl so it looks like
<td class=”{id}”>
Hope this one shows alright.
To work in chrome as well change the following:
var win = window.open(”, ‘printgrid’);
win.document.write(html);
win.document.close();
win.print();
win.close();
to the follwing
var win = window.open(”, ‘printgrid’);
win.document.write(html);
win.document.close();
win.focus();
win.print();
win.focus();
win.close();