How to: Enumerate a Subset of Print Queues

Article
11/03/2006

A common situation faced by information technology (IT) professionals managing a company-wide set of printers is to generate a list of printers having certain characteristics. This functionality is provided by the GetPrintQueues method of a PrintServer object and the EnumeratedPrintQueueTypes enumeration.

Example

In the example below, the code begins by creating an array of flags that specify the characteristics of the print queues we want to list. In this example, we are looking for print queues that are installed locally on the print server and are shared. The EnumeratedPrintQueueTypes enumeration provides many other possibilities.

The code then creates a LocalPrintServer object, a class derived from PrintServer. The local print server is the computer on which the application is running.

The last significant step is to pass the array to the GetPrintQueues method.

Finally, the results are presented to the user.

// Specify that the list will contain only the print queues that are installed as local and are shared
array<System::Printing::EnumeratedPrintQueueTypes>^ enumerationFlags = {EnumeratedPrintQueueTypes::Local,EnumeratedPrintQueueTypes::Shared};

LocalPrintServer^ printServer = gcnew LocalPrintServer();

//Use the enumerationFlags to filter out unwanted print queues
PrintQueueCollection^ printQueuesOnLocalServer = printServer->GetPrintQueues(enumerationFlags);

Console::WriteLine("These are your shared, local print queues:\n\n");

for each (PrintQueue^ printer in printQueuesOnLocalServer)
{
   Console::WriteLine("\tThe shared printer " + printer->Name + " is located at " + printer->Location + "\n");
}
Console::WriteLine("Press enter to continue.");
Console::ReadLine();

// Specify that the list will contain only the print queues that are installed as local and are shared
EnumeratedPrintQueueTypes[] enumerationFlags = {EnumeratedPrintQueueTypes.Local,
                                                EnumeratedPrintQueueTypes.Shared};

LocalPrintServer printServer = new LocalPrintServer();

//Use the enumerationFlags to filter out unwanted print queues
PrintQueueCollection printQueuesOnLocalServer = printServer.GetPrintQueues(enumerationFlags);

Console.WriteLine("These are your shared, local print queues:\n\n");

foreach (PrintQueue printer in printQueuesOnLocalServer)
{
    Console.WriteLine("\tThe shared printer " + printer.Name + " is located at " + printer.Location + "\n");
}
Console.WriteLine("Press enter to continue.");
Console.ReadLine();

You could extend this example by having the foreach loop that steps through each print queue do further screening. For example, you could screen out printers that do not support two-sided printing by having the loop call each print queue's GetPrintCapabilities method and test the returned value for the presence of duplexing. See Creating an XPS Document Sample for an example.

How to: Enumerate a Subset of Print Queues

Example

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