Printer status and held jobs
Printer status and held jobs
What each printer status means, and why a label waits for a printer instead of being lost.
DataMagik asks each Zebra printer for its status through the site's connector. It shows the answer in Printer Management, and uses it to decide whether to send a label now or hold it until the printer can print.
Statuses
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ready | The printer answered and reported nothing wrong. |
| Needs attention | The printer can print, but reported something to look at soon, such as "replace printhead", a cold printhead or a full receive buffer. |
| Not ready | The printer reported something that stops it printing. The reason is shown, for example "Not ready: paper out". |
| Offline | The printer did not answer at all. It may be switched off, unplugged, or at a new address. |
| Online | A printer that is not a Zebra answered. It does not report a status of its own, so DataMagik can only say it is reachable. |
Printers are checked about every 10 minutes. Select Refresh status on a printer, or on several selected printers, to check now. The panel shows when a printer was Last checked.
What stops a printer printing
A printer is Not ready, and its labels are held, when it reports any of these:
- paper out
- ribbon out
- head open
- paused
- head too hot
- an error the printer itself reports as stopping it, such as a cutter fault
A cold printhead (for example a printer in a freezer), a full receive buffer during a large batch, and lost settings are shown as Needs attention. The printer still prints through them, so labels are still sent.
Held jobs
When a label is sent to a Zebra that reports a fault, the label is not sent into a printer that cannot print it. The job is held instead, with a reason that names the printer and what is wrong:
Waiting for printer Dock 3: paper out. It prints when the printer is ready.
- Released by itself. While a printer has held jobs, DataMagik checks it about every 30 seconds. As soon as it is ready, for example once labels are loaded and the head is closed, its held jobs print. Nobody has to resend them.
- In order. Held jobs print oldest first. A new label for a printer that has held jobs waits behind them, so serialized labels come out in sequence.
- Cancel if you no longer need them. A held job can be cancelled from Print Jobs.
- Not forever. A job still held after 24 hours fails, so a printer that is never fixed does not print day-old labels.
The printer list shows how many jobs are held for each printer, and the Held jobs filter lists every printer with held jobs. Held jobs also appear in the printer's Jobs tab.
USB printers whose computer is gone
A USB printer's jobs go only to the connector on the computer it is plugged into. If that connector is removed or moved to another site, its jobs are held with a reason that says so: "the computer it is plugged into is no longer registered at this site". Add the printer again from the connector on its computer, or use Replace… on Connector Setup when the computer itself was replaced.
Printers that do not report a status
Office printers (IPP) and printers that are not Zebras are never held: DataMagik cannot ask them whether they can print. A Zebra that accepts the connection but does not answer the status request is also treated as able to print, as it always was.
Held jobs need connector 1.5.0 or later. A site whose connectors are older prints exactly as before.
Checking status from a script
connectors.getPrinterStatus(printer) returns the printer's last status: ready, online, problems, warnings and checkedAt. See Printing labels and documents.
Related pages
- Printers
- Print Jobs
- Printers as Shop Floor equipment: open an incident when a printer cannot print