Print Suite .Net • Architecture

Everything in Print Suite .Net is started from (and finished by) DocumentDesigner component. It contains all the information about printed document, supports printing and links PrintPreviewControl, PreviewToolbar and PreviewStatusBar. It's a heart of Print Suite .Net.

The main property of DocumentDesigner is Document, that contains Sections property - list of document sections. The only reason that we should divide the document into several sections - we may be the need to have different types of pages. For instance, we can have cover page with some graphics and document title, then content pages, then main document pages with chapter header at the top and page number at the bottom, then pages with alfabetical index and then back cover. Of course, we can create all these pages manually, but the simplest way is to create several sections for cover, content, body, index and back cover and let specialized print providers to do all the job without manual code. As you can see below, we have two lists in each page section - Page and Content. The providers added into Page list will be applied to all the pages of the section, and the real content and page count will be determined by the providers from Content list. So, if we need the page number on each page, all we have to do is to add PageNumberProvider into Page list of the section. Both Page and Content may contain an arbitrary number of providers, as well as the Sections list may contain arbitrary number of sections.

In the common case, the document looks like this:

Public components, available in the Visual Studio's Toolbox

Structure of the document is being edited by the editor of DocumentDesigner's Document property. This editor allows to create, reorder and delete sections and add, reorder and delete providers in the Page and Content lists of each section:

As you can see you can add providers into Page and Content list of any section, just click the Add button and you'll see list of providers from your current form. We don't have to worry about page count, all that we have to do is simply add sections and providers, and DocumentDesigner will do the rest.