Unisys ServiceCenter Firefox printing fix

For anyone still living in Unisys-land (aren't I glad they're not filling out my wage slip any more ), and for anyone else forced to use their "idiosyncratic" (read shite) web tools here's a little something.

If you've been forced to use the web (ie HTML not Java) version of their (Peregrine-based) ServiceCenter tool, you'll notice that its dog-slow if you're using IE and has a whole myriad of intermittent problems. The obvious, and really quite effective, solution is to use Firefox. This speeds up ServiceCenter measurably and seems to get around most of the other problems.

Or at least it used to. Firefox v1.0 to v1.08 all work absolutely perfectly, but Firefox 1.5 introduced one teeny-weeny and yet show-stopping printing bug that stops you from being able to print any useful info from ServiceCenter (technical details here in Mozilla bug 326162 if you're interested). Unfortunately according to the recent Firefox 2 beta release it doesn't look like it'll be fixed in Firefox 2 when that's released , and checking Firefox trunk (the ongoing work to create the not even alpha yet Firefox 3) the bug actually looks even worse at the moment.

So after reading this page on creating your own "user stylesheets" in Mozilla and this page that mentions a new experimental CSS rule, I put two and two together and actually came up with four for once!

So here's how to get Unisys ServiceCenter printing correctly in Firefox versions 1.5 and newer:

• Download a recent version of Firefox
• Run it
• Close it
• Find your Firefox profile folder (see here if you can't find your profile folder, and bear in mind that your profile may be in a Windows network roaming profile, or may be on your C drive).
• Inside your Firefox profile folder look in the "Chrome" folder
• Do you have a file in there called "userContent.css"? If so, open that file in Notepad, if not create a new text file with that name and then open it in Notepad.
• Paste the following text into the "userContent.css" file:

  
  /* Fix b0rked ServiceCenter printing in Firefox 1.5+
  see Mozilla Bug 326162 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326162 */
  
  @-moz-document domain(www.sc-ps.unisys.com){
  div.labl, div.val { overflow:visible !important; } }
  

• Save the file
• Open Firefox
• Re-visit ServiceCenter and try printing a ticket out
• Send me thanks, adoration, first-born children, money or just leave me a comment below saying how it worked out for you (actually forget the first-born children I wouldn't have a clue what to do with them).

One final note, Unisys have been known to change the server these web apps are on periodically, if so you need to edit the bit that says domain(www.sc-ps.unisys.com) to reflect the new server name. This may or may not work for other company's Peregrine web interfaces, may be broken at some point in the future by an upgrade to the website or to FIrefox, YMMV). Also this Mozilla bug may be fixed at some point in the future, so at that point you can safely delete the above lines from Firefox's userContent.css.