Re: Automated Unattended Convert spoolfile to Excel and emailed as an attachement

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 5:17 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So the big issue with parsing spooled files is that they are not
consistently formatted from record to record. There are headings,
footers, totals, extra space after groupings and so on. [...]

Coming to the point, decades ago, I used a product called Monarch. It
runs on the PC. You provide a template and it uses that template to
suss out what the detail lines are and extract them to a spreadsheet.

That sounds very much like DataImport, which was/is a companion
product to RJS's WinSpool. We still have ancient versions of these
running in production, though we are gradually migrating WinSpool
reports to Excel reports generated completely on the i and e-mailed
directly from the i. (It's a lot like our migration from a huge
legacy RPG III codebase to RPG IV.)

It turns out that Datawatch (the makers of Monarch) are still in
business, and their successor product seems like it might be able to
extract a spreadsheet from a report (among its many other bells and
whistles.) http://www.datawatch.com/products/datawatch-modeler/

Looks fancy. Seems to have grown into something much more than what
you've described of Monarch (and well beyond the DataImport that I'm
familiar with).

John Y.