How to determine whether a local printer is Online?

[isladogs]

In further researching this question, I noted that perhaps you don't want to look at the printer, you want to look at the driver for the printer.

Win32_PrinterDriver class - Win32 apps

The Win32\_PrinterDriver WMI class represents the drivers for a Win32\_Printer instance.

docs.microsoft.com

The code looks similar but you need to query the driver rather than the printer to determine status. There is a code snippet in the linked article.

Tried that. There are many properties for each printer driver of which 3 printer driver properties looked promising: StartMode, Started, Status.
Unfortunately, all 3 properties are blank for each installed printer driver on my PC

 

[Isaac]

Not valid in Access

View attachment 94874

However, you can of course do both of these:

?Application.Printers.Count
7

?Application.Printer.DeviceName
EPSON AL-C1600

The DeviceName gives the default printer but there isn't a property to indicate whether it is switched on !

Right, you'd have to declare an Excel application instance and create it first, which is why I mentioned two lines of code rather than one.

I've discovered a lot of times in Access there have been little tricks I can do by automating Excel and because Excel is nifty at certain things, it actually ends up being less code than the access equivalent. I shouldn't say a lot of times. I should say it's happened to handful of times so it's sometimes occurs to me in situations like this.

 

[isladogs]

Right, you'd have to declare an Excel application instance and create it first, which is why I mentioned two lines of code rather than one.

I've discovered a lot of times in Access there have been little tricks I can do by automating Excel and because Excel is nifty at certain things, it actually ends up being less code than the access equivalent. I shouldn't say a lot of times. I should say it's happened to handful of times so it's sometimes occurs to me in situations like this.

Sorry I misinterpreted what you meant. However, I've since tried it in Excel

?Application.PrintCommunication returns True for me whether or not the printer is switched on.
It was still true when I physically disconnected it from the PC

The help file suggests otherwise: Application.PrintCommunication property (Excel) | Microsoft Docs

Specifies whether communication with the printer is turned on. Read/write Boolean.

 

[Jason Lee Hayes]

I just tried the code that @arnelgp supplied.

View attachment 94869
It correctly identifies the default printer (the only 'real' printer in the list) but reports it as 2 (unknown) whether or not it is switched on & ready to print.
I then found an item sitting in the EPSON print queue and removed it.
The printer status was then shown as 3 like all the rest whether or not it was switched on

Just wondering - has anyone checked whether those printer status values are correct? I haven't d

 

[Jason Lee Hayes]

Just thinking out of the box... Could we not monitor the print que "winspool.drv"; from there we could then determine if a print request has failed through event return or time out in which we could cancel the request in the print que to print and use this return value accordingly..

Monitoring a Printer Queue from VB.NET

How to monitor a printer queue from Visual Basic .NET

www.codeproject.com

Binaryworld - How to monitor Printer Queue using printer API ... [ VB -> Printing ]

 

[isladogs]

This thread has some similarities to several previous threads asking how to detect whether an Access BE is being connected using Wifi.
It is easy to determine whether a workstation has both Ethernet and Wifi connected but I've still not found a way of determining which is currently in use. For example see Solved - Confirm LAN connection. | Access World Forums (access-programmers.co.uk).

This may be a similar issue. It should be easy to do but it appears otherwise