How to develop a subroutine that writes onto a form and can be used by .printdocument

See more:

VB

graphics

printing

I'm hoping here is a simple answer that my lack of programming skills are hiding from me... I generate reports that I'd like to immediately display on a FORM for the Users review and acceptance. Once accepted this can be PRINTED. The "on-form" report is a subset of the full report that is included in the printed document (includes logo's, border graphics and more detail text, etc), so most of the generation of the document is the same, but not all. Rather than duplicate all the report code twice, once for the form and again for printing I hope there is a way to generate a common subroutine that both the form report and printing routines can call and that contains the conditional formatting lines.

For writing to the Form:

Module DisplayCode

  Sub WriteOnFrom()
    ' writes to form 

    With frmOutput
      .Visible = True
      .WindowState = FormWindowState.Normal
      .PrintPreviewControl.Visible = False
      Dim drawPen As Pen
      Dim drawBrush As SolidBrush
      Dim drawFont As Font
      Dim drawObject As Graphics = .CreateGraphics()  'Create object for the page
      
      Dim drawString As String = "Sample Text"

      drawObject.Clear(Color.White)   'clears the current screen

      drawFont = New Font("Arial", 16, FontStyle.Bold)
      drawBrush = New SolidBrush(Color.BlueViolet)
      drawObject.DrawString("text in a box", drawFont, drawBrush, 150, 50)
      drawFont = New Font("Calibri", 20, FontStyle.Italic)
      drawBrush = New SolidBrush(Color.Red)
      drawObject.DrawString("text above a line", drawFont, drawBrush, 150, 290)
      drawPen = New Pen(Color.Black, 3)
      drawObject.DrawRectangle(drawPen, 120, 50, 200, 25)
      drawPen = New Pen(Color.Purple, 5)
      drawObject.DrawLine(drawPen, 150, 320, 350, 320)

      drawFont.Dispose()
      drawBrush.Dispose()
      drawObject.Dispose()
    End With

  End Sub

End Module

For the PrintDocument:

Public Class PrintOutput
  Inherits System.Drawing.Printing.PrintDocument

Private Sub PrintOutput_PrintPage(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Drawing.Printing.PrintPageEventArgs) Handles Me.PrintPage
    'Prepares printed document

    Dim drawPen As Pen
    Dim drawBrush As SolidBrush
    Dim drawFont As Font
    Dim drawString As String = "Sample Text"

    'Can I move this to a subroutine outside the Class?
    drawFont = New Font("Arial", 16, FontStyle.Bold)
    drawBrush = New SolidBrush(Color.BlueViolet)
    e.Graphics.DrawString("text in a box", drawFont, drawBrush, 150, 50)
    drawFont = New Font("Calibri", 20, FontStyle.Italic)
    drawBrush = New SolidBrush(Color.Red)
    e.Graphics.DrawString("text above a line", drawFont, drawBrush, 150, 290)
    drawPen = New Pen(Color.Black, 3)
    e.Graphics.DrawRectangle(drawPen, 120, 50, 200, 25)
    drawPen = New Pen(Color.Purple, 5)
    e.Graphics.DrawLine(drawPen, 150, 320, 350, 320)

    e.HasMorePages = False

    drawFont.Dispose()
    drawBrush.Dispose()
    drawPen.Dispose()

  End Sub
End Class

Of course, this the same report for both for now, so just an example to demo the principles.

What I have tried:

Of course its possible to use the PrintPreview control on my frmOutput and develop this all as a PrintDocument object but I'd rather not. Firstly, it takes a while to generate this (on-form is instantaneous), secondly I'm not interested in the paper size format etc and just fit it onto a fixed size frmOutput and finally, I still don't know how to generate a subset of this report for the PrintPreview control relative to the full report for printing.

BTW for the form report it appears I still have to use .CreateGraphics() to write to the form itself, which is a conflict to simply using e.Graphics. for PrintDocument. I'm not especially committed to writing directly to the form, so any control placed on the form that accepts text & graphis will do.

Any great suggestions?