Re: Bundling Spool Files

Alan,

That's the same way that I saw the request.

I gather that each of these batch process' are run independently.  I
would ask if they can be processed concurrently.  The reason being that
I recall an article years ago about speeding up batch process by having
a synchronous file prefetch added to the batch job.  Now this does not
directly relate to the issue at hand, but the technique may be put to
use.

Each of the batch print programs would need to have data queues added to
them that they could wait on, with a new driver program that opens and
closes a common spool file for each customer encountered.  It would
control the other batch jobs to continue processing and adding to this
common spool file.  At each new customer, they would  wait on the data
queue until they received a go code.

That's just one idea.  Now if the batch jobs can not be changed, the
only solution that I can think of is to copy all of the spool files to
disk, retaining the print controls and processing them by brute force. 
You would have to store enough of the report until you found a place on
the page that contained the customer number.  Take all of this output
and place it into a new spool file, open and close by customer.  This
may be a good candidate for creating a finite state machine.


alan shore wrote:
> 
> I may be mistaken, but I think the original request was NOT strictly bundling 
>the spool files together, but sorting the contents of those spool files so 
>that customer A has statements/invoices/bills from spool 1,2,3 and 4, followed 
>by customer B from spool 2 and 4 followed by customer C from spool 1 and 3. I 
>hope that my interpretation is correct as I am in the process of analyzing the 
>same problem, and if anyone has an answer, obviously, I would be very 
>interested.
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