How to catch print jobs in C# .NET

Question

I am trying to catch every print jobs submitted to printer in our local network. I want to display some properties of the job like job name, submit time and so on.

I tried a while loop but it didn't catch my print job, maybe beacuse it happened while the thread was sleeping. Is there an event that I can register and handle? I don't want to spend all of the CPU resource for this task infinetly looping.

I tried this:

public static void WritePrinterJobs()
    {
        while (true)
        {
            foreach (var job in LocalPrintServer.GetDefaultPrintQueue().GetPrintJobInfoCollection())
            {
                Console.WriteLine(job.Submitter + " " + job.TimeJobSubmitted.ToShortDateString());
            }
            Thread.Sleep(100);
        }
    }

EDIT: The code above actually works, you don't need to go lower level if it does work for you, my mistake was not configuring default printer correctly.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6506916/events-in-printqueue — adt, Apr 19 '12 at 13:44
Let it be noted that if you're using a foreach loop that is constantly running, if a lot of print jobs happen at once, the document that is going to be printed might get printed before you're code finds it — , Apr 19 '12 at 13:48
But still do I have to check again print jobs using a timer? I think there is no JobAdded kind of event that I can hook, right? — Mert Akcakaya, Apr 19 '12 at 13:55

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 19 '12 at 14:09

5

I found the solution. For those are searching for a way to handle print job events take a look:

FindFirstPrinterChangeNotification

and also a working code can be found Monitoring print jobs

answered Apr 19 '12 at 14:09

Mert Akcakaya

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 28 '20 at 04:14

I had the same requirement where I tried implementing as suggested by Mert Akcakaya in his answer. This works all fine but might stop if by any chance a windows service Print Spooler stops working.

So instead, I have implemented using WMI. A detail explanation is provided in this Codeproject article here

Referring to this article, I had written a below piece of code that keeps monitoring the printer jobs. Here I am only interested in the print job Spooling.

   internal void MonitorPrinterJobs()
        {                
            try
            {
                Task.Run(async delegate
                   {
                       while (true)
                       {
                           string searchQuery = "SELECT * FROM Win32_PrintJob";
                           ManagementObjectSearcher searchPrintJobs = new ManagementObjectSearcher(searchQuery);
                           ManagementObjectCollection prntJobCollection = searchPrintJobs.Get();
                           foreach (ManagementObject prntJob in prntJobCollection)
                           {
                               string jobName = prntJob.Properties["Name"].Value.ToString();
                               string jobStatus = Convert.ToString(prntJob.Properties["JobStatus"]?.Value);

                               if (jobStatus == "Spooling")
                               {
                                  // do job
                               }
                           }
                           await Task.Delay(100);
                       }
                   });
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
               // handle exception
            }
        }

How to catch print jobs in C# .NET

2 Answers2

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