String Manipulation in C#

I am working on c# .net application, and using cry开发者_运维知识库stal reports. I need to print crystal reports on dot matrix printer, but speed of printing is very slow as crystal reports prints in graphical mode. So i moves to dos based printing and use RawPrinter helper class to print it. That works completly fine.

But writing a dataset to a text file(in invoice report format), uses lots of string manipulation for positioning the characters, spacing etc. I use string builder class and padding and lots of if, else to print page totals, grand totals, taxes etc.

Writing a text file in this way is such a pain.

Please suggest me some other feasible and effective approach.

Thanks

You can export the dataset to XML (DataSet.WriteXml) and transform it to another textual format using XSLT.

You need some sort of templateing engine, but as you are not doing HTML you need the engine to be stand-alone. See C# template engine for some options.

XSLT is a good option if you like XML and already know how to use it, otherwise I would tend to code with a more "code focused" solution.

I had a similar issue and changing printers was not a solution because of 1800 or so clients using dot matrix printers. So solution I came up with was to use a templating engine (StringTemplate http://www.stringtemplate.org/), get the output text file and send it to the printer.

use tabs for everything. it will let you put stuff in tab columns automatically.