[cups.general] Physical destination from class print job

[henri]

> In a lab environment we have two printers (printera and printerb) in  
> a print class "lab". We would like to have a heads-up display by the  
> printers showing where a user could expect their job to come out,  
> but there does not seem to be a way in the CUPS API to query for  
> that information. Jobs entered into the "lab" queue never gain any  
> tagging based on their physical destination, with the exception of  
> the CUPS RSS feed. After a job has been completed, the RSS feed will  
> get a message indicating that job name foo was completed on  
> printera, but printera never gets job foo in its completed print  
> queue.
>
> Is there a way to get this kind of information from the server, or  
> is it a pending feature request?

One option is to have the physical printer or the print server which  
spools the job to the physical printer, report back to the machine  
which initiated the job details regarding which printer the job was  
sent.

If your clients are running Windows then there is a messaging  
protocol. If the clients are running Mac OS X then there is Growl. I  
am guessing that on LINUX windows managers will have something similar  
even if you have to install this as a separate package or build  
something to provide reporting. There are also other options for  
communicating with systems above are just a few options.

Another option for reporting would be to have PrintAgent (open source  
system for reporting back to the client and gathering user  
credentials) report this information via a web page. At least by  
default, PrintAgent is set to display a web page in a URL. However,  
you could edit the script and make it do what ever you need in your  
lab situation. Details on PrintAgent are available from : http://www.lucidsystems.org/printingworks/printagent/

Hope this helps.