COBI.wms supports two types of printing:

• Contacting a network printer directly from the mobile device
• Contacting the Print Service running on a MS Windows Server

The first option is mostly suitable for printing wares labels, and the second for printing booked documents. Correspondingly, the Print Settings screen of the Android app is split into these two sections:

This type of printing requires a network-capable printer, but no additional server-side software. The Android device will contact the IP Address of the printer in the local network and send it the document to print.

For label printing, the app uses templates in a custom HTML-based format which is described here: Label Templates

Under the label printing setting, you will notice that there is once again a choice of two methods: Android standard and ZPL-compatible.

Choosing the Android standard method means that whenever you want the app to print a label, it will generate the page to be printed but delegate the actual printing task to the Android operating system. This requires your network printer to be compatible with Android, which is often not the case.

The ZPL-compatible method will make the app construct print commands in the Zebra Programming Language and send them directly to the printer, bypassing the Android system. While ZPL was developed by Zebra initially, it has become a de facto standard in the industry, meaning that most label printer brands (such as TSC, cab, Brady, Godex, etc.) support ZPL emulation, making them all compatible with COBI.wms.

As the name implies, this setting is only needed if you choose the ZPL-compatible method for label printing.

The text field must be filled with the IP addresses of the ZPL-compatible network printers, one IP address per line. If your printers have resolvable names in your local DNS, you may of course also use their host names instead of IP addresses.

Most of the time, this field can be left empty. However, a small number of ZPL-compatible network printers might have a peculiar TCP/IP implementation which requires the TCP send buffer to be set to a particular size. For example, printers from the brand Godex might require this field to have the value of 1024.

This type of printing requires the COBI.wms Print Service to be installed on a Windows Server that can be reached from the Android mobile devices.

Currently, the document printing feature works solely in combination with coresuite designer layouts.

This text field must be filled with the IP address or host name of the Windows Server on which the COBI.wms Print Service service is running.

The default port is 9110. If you configured the service to use a different TCP port, then you must specify the port number via the format <host>:<port> in this field.

For example, if the Windows Server has the IP address 192.168.16.20 and the port number of the COBI.wms Print Service is configured to be 9120, then the text field must contain: 192.168.16.20:9120

If you've configured the Print Service with multi-tenancy support, you must enter the correct AuthToken value into the Authentication text field. Otherwise, you must leave the field empty.

The rest of the print settings screen consists of Print Mode, Layout ID, and Print Def fields for each type of booking where the app supports printing. These values must correspond to the the coresuite print modes, designer layout IDs, and print definitions.