Printing Labels with the Printer Widget#
The Printer widget can be used to print labels directly from Collect to a Zebra MZ or iMZ label printer.
Requirements
The print widget requires two additional apps to be installed on your device:
Labels contain one or more of the following:
1D Barcode, encoding a number
QR Code, encoding text
Text
These three components always appear in this order.
Their content is specified
in the calculation column of the XLSForm,
using the concat() function.
The three components are included as strings,
separated by '<br>',
the XML line break tag.
type |
name |
label |
appearance |
calculation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
text |
printer_widget |
Printer widget |
concat('123456789','<br>’,'QR CODE','<br>','Text') |
To exclude any of the label components, put an empty string in its place. For example, to print only a QR CODE, with no barcode or text:
calculation |
|---|
concat('','<br>','QR CODE content here','<br>','') |
Or, to print only the barcode and text:
calculation |
|---|
concat('1234567890','<br>','','<br>','Some text.') |
Including data from previous questions#
Typically, labels are used to print data from previous questions.
For example, you might print a label with the name of the survey participant:
type |
name |
label |
appearance |
calculation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
text |
full_name |
Participant Name |
||
text |
print_name_label |
Print Name Label |
concat('','<br>','${full_name}',<br>,'${full_name}') |
Note
The printer widget is used whenever a text field
has an appearance attribute that begins with printer.
The full form for the appearance attribute is printer:{intentname},
where {intentname} identifies the printer driver.
By copying and modifying the ODK Zebra Printer Driver source code, and then specifying the intent name for that new driver, you can create your own customized label formats without needing to also modify Collect.