RE: Microsoft Word and the iSeries

I'm only now reading this, sorry for the slow response :)

I think the best advice is steer clear of MS-Word.  There are vendors
out there that provide this sort of solution, and we have partnered with
one (I'm probably saying too much already, so I won't name names).  They
have a great product that is very powerful, but it's Achilles heel is
that it's based around COM automation of MS-Word in an unattended
environment.  We fought constant crashes and instability for years.  It
was fine for low-to-moderate volumes, but when the volume went up it got
ugly, both from the standpoint of the product itself, and from the
tremendous system resources used by the QZDASOINIT jobs that gathered
the data.  

Other vendors use MS-Word to generate the document template, but then
save using XML features and use some other solution to actually render
the document.  Never seen this in action, but it might be a better
solution.

If I were going to roll my own solution for this, It would seem a
no-brainer to look at constructing documents as some sort of HTML.  

I also believe there are some java-based open source solutions
available.  Check source-forge.

Good luck!

Joe Hayes.
 

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces+joe.hayes=fiserv.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces+joe.hayes=fiserv.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Mike Cunningham
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 11:16 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: Microsoft Word and the iSeries

Has anyone ever tried combining the CGI tool set with letter printing?
Just like in CGI apps have a shell HTML file in the ifs that is loaded
into the RPG app. Use the normal CGI functions to scan/replace the HTML
file with the variable data. Then <insert magic here> to print the HTML
file.  I did this with some e-mail apps where I have an HTML shell, use
the CGI tools to scan/replace and then get the HTML buffer and put it in
the body of the e-mail. I always get hung-up on the printing with this
concept. 

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jim Franz
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 11:25 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Microsoft Word and the iSeries

I know the request is for Word, but if to store docs for reprinting &
such, I would choose pdf, and there are many tools for writing pdf, and
all they need is the free Acrobat Reader.
I do have a cust that needed many merged Word docs (after Officevision
left the building...), & we wrote a VB pgm to pull the data from the
iSeries.
Each doc has our own substitution markers <cusname>, etc.
It works well except that Word itself crashes often. Once you get a copy
of Word running in the Task Manager, cannot open Word in another window
& do another merge - locks up. We trained them on removing "not
responding"
copies of Word. Also - did not work well on a Terminal Server. We have
Word loaded on each C: drive.
Jim Franz

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Mason" <jonathan.mason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 11:04 AM
Subject: RE: Microsoft Word and the iSeries

Hi Pete

I suppose what they are basically looking for is a means of using Word

for

generating their forms, for example an invoice, and to populate the

form

with AS400 data rather than print the forms over the AS400 data.

Mail merge could work to a certain extent by including all header
information (e.g. name, address, etc) on each detail record in the

data

source, but this seems cumbersome.

From an AS400/iSeries/i5/System i perspective I would do whatever

coding

necessary in RPG, on the PC I could muddle something together in VB.

All the best

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pete Helgren
Sent: 17 January 2007 15:36
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Microsoft Word and the iSeries

OK.  If mail merge (in Windows) isn't what you want, then you could
potentially use several other approaches to generating a "document" on
the System i.  Perhaps a bit more about the solution you envision

would

be helpful.  What languages are you comfortable with?  What volumes of
documents are you anticipating?

Pete Helgren

I thought about using mail merge and then discounted it for a couple

of

reasons:

1) The need to be able to have (potentially) header, detail and

footer

data

to be merged and

2) The additional manual steps needed to run the mail merge

Ideally they want to be able to generate the document on the iSeries

and

place it in the IFS where Word can find it.  I also thought about

generating

an RTF file and including replacement codes such as %%ORDERNO%% which

the

programs could overwrite with the correct values, but on looking at

an 

RTF
file's structure it looked too prone to errors.

Thanks

Jonathan

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