Re: Printing pdf data from teh AS/400

Gary,

We've had our utilities to do this for over 15 years now (and still run on
V5R2 or later).

With a combination of SPLTOOL, MAILTOOL and OUTQTRG you can set up a
"trigger" on an output queue.

You can set up different "triggers" depending on a host of things such as
file name, user name, user data, etc.

When a trigger is matched, the associated command or program is run. In
your case, you could call a SPL2EMAIL command that would both convert a
spooled file to PDF and email it in one step.

Just thought I'd throw that out there for those who aren't up to date on OS
releases.

Brad
www.bvstools.com

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 2:33 PM, Gary Thompson <gthompson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Alan,

Today it's just me getting acquainted: I was surprised at how simple V7R1
makes creating a basic PDF.

My next step is to automate a program that currently reports errors found
by our robotic picking system.
That program creates the typical spool file for errors reported by the
picking system.
We need those errors e-mailed to our Order Dispatch team.

An example:

Each afternoon, customer orders that are ready are selected by the
Dispatch Team which converts
orders into (virtual) pallets of product that can be handled by our
warehouse, our various delivery
vehicles and our customers.

Like our customers, their orders, our pallets and delivery vehicles, all
come in various shapes and sizes
so the Dispatch team is trained to organize orders into pallet
configurations that 1) are stable, 2) able to
be processed by robotic equipment and 3) appropriate for delivery to
specific customers.

Think Costco vs 7-11 and you get a sense of what I'm trying to describe.

Our warehouse equipment is limited to pallets of a ton or less and just
under 6 feet total height.
There are many different pallets/shipping containers that fall into about
four shape-size categories.

With all this on the Dispatch Team's plate, there are a number of errors
that will be reported by the
robot, each of which mean "I will have nothing to do with this
load/collection of pallets because . . ."

As you can imagine, the Dispatch Team is very busy, heads down, so
skipping the trip to the printer
to try to find a piece of paper will be a big step up in efficiency for us.

For me, this is a break-through day because this iSeries feature is the
first time I've had the tools in
my hands (I'm a little behind times you can see) to create the kind of
error reporting that can meet
our warehouses' needs.

I expect next to be sending text messages to phones/tablets on our shop
floor . . .