Printing in ADF, the <af:showPrintablePageBehavior> and showing the browser print dialog

ADF comes with a couple of rather easy to implement options for printing and rendering printable pages. The most obvious one is the <af:showPrintablePageBehavior/>. As the document describes, this renders the page without any command components, and as such will look better on paper. The big drawback however is that this is just the same page rendered differently. What if the actual behavior you need is to open the print dialog of the browser ?
There is a javascript function in the ADF client side API hat you can use to do exactly this. The function is simply self.print() and it opens up the browser's print dialog.


To use the function, just drop an tag into a command button like so :

The corresponding code in your jspx/jsff would be :

<af:commandToolbarButton text="show print dialog" id="ctb2">
    <af:clientListener method="self.print" type="action"/>
</af:commandToolbarButton>

And of course you can use the self.print()function insde your own custom java script that ou embed with the af:resource tag. The downside of this approach is that what you see is what you get.
The page is sent to the printer as is, Its not specifically made "printer friendly" by removing CSS and command buttons that the <af:showPrintablePageBehavior/> does .


The <af:showPrintablePageBehavior/> approach would be :

<af:commandToolbarButton text="show printable page" id="ctb1">
   <af:showPrintablePageBehavior/>                
</af:commandToolbarButton>

Update : Related post on How to change the layout of the printable page or how to fetch more data before displaying the printable page