[LINUX5250] Re: automatic file name generation for or scs2pdf

[Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Elmars Ositis wrote:
>
> I am looking into archiving as400 reports in a windows readable format.

Any particular format?  Is .txt okay?   Are you archiving them on a
Windows machine or on a unix machine?

>
> Since I need to archive a few hundred reports per day, the current
> mechanisms by idenfiying individual reports makes it difficult to identify
> which output file contains which report.
>

What are the "current mechanisms"?

> I noticed in the code for scs2pdf there is the possibility for scs2pdf to
> save to a parsed report name, with the report name gathered from either the
> first line of the report or (ideally) from the report file name in the
> as400 queue?

I'm not sure what you're saying that you noticed from the code of scs2pdf,
since I'm sure we don't have code to either parse out a report name or to
get the spooled file name...

I don't think that the AS/400 even sends us a spooled file name.   It
thinks that we are a printer, and only sends the data it wants us to
print.  It doesn't know that we're a computer program that might be
archiving the data.

>
> Is there a simpler way of doing this?
>

Personally, if I wanted to archive all of my reports, I wouldn't attempt
to do it with lp5250d.   I'd write a program that runs on my iSeries that
uses the Host Print Transform API to transform my spooled file into a .txt
file.  At that point, I'd be able to retrieve all of the info from the
spool, and I could name the file whatever I wanted.

If you need it to be PDF, then I'd look at IBM's InfoPrint server, or I'd
look into Brad Stone's SPLTOOLs.  I haven't used either of these
solutions, but I've heard good things about them.  In any case, I'd try to
do it in such a way that a program on my iSeries would be able to see the
spooled file, retrieve it's attributes, and try to transform it, instead
of trying to act like a printer.

If you do decide to use scs2pdf to archive the reports, then you'll
probably want to write a script that lp5250d can call.   Have that script
run both scs2ascii and scs2pdf on the data.   Use scs2ascii's output to
get the report name (doing the appropriate parsing).

That's my 2 cents.