How to access the status of the printer?

Question

I need to know the Printer Status. I need to control the Printer Status using Java Program. Example

1. Check the Printer status, weather will it accept the Job

Answer 1

UPDATE: Instead of querying WMI "win32_printer" object I would recommend using Powershell directly like this, its much cleaner API :

Get-Printer | where PrinterStatus -like 'Normal' | fl

To see all the printers and statuses:

Get-Printer | fl Name, PrinterStatus

To see all the attributes:

Get-Printer | fl

You can still use ProcessBuilder in Java as described below.

Before update:

Solution for Windows only. In Windows you can query WMI "win32_printer" class, so you check that the state on OS layer: Win32_Printer class

In Java you can use ProcessBuilder like this to start PowerShell and execute the PS script like this:

String printerName = "POS_PRINTER";
ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder("powershell.exe", "get-wmiobject -class win32_printer | Select-Object Name, PrinterState, PrinterStatus | where {$_.Name -eq '"+printerName+"'}");

String fullStatus = null;
Process reg;
builder.redirectErrorStream(true);
try {
    reg = builder.start();
    fullStatus = getStringFromInputStream(reg.getInputStream());
    reg.destroy();
} catch (IOException e1) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e1.printStackTrace();
}
System.out.print(fullStatus);

After converting the InputStream to String you should get something like that:

Name        PrinterState PrinterStatus
----        ------------ -------------
POS_PRINTER            0             3

State and Status should change for various situations (printer turned off, out of paper, cover opened,...).

This should work, but depends on the printer and drivers. I used this with EPSON TM printers with ESDPRT port and I could get information like: no paper, cover open, printer offline/turned off, printer paused.

More comprehensive answer here: - my StackOverflow answer on a similar question.