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

There is an Info Print Redbook that contains a sample user mapping program in RPG.

At my last job we had a program that took a spool file and created a named PDF, (named with a name we provided as opposed to the random name that Info Print creates) and then e-mailed the PDF to a user or users, or FTPed it to a cataloging system on a Windows server. There was a lot of internal plumbing we added for the naming and FTPing, but the code to direct Info Print was cribbed and adapted from the Redbook.

Unfortunately, our program did not do any Excel conversion. And while Info Print will convert a spool file to a PDF, I'm not sure it will do a conversion to Excel, and my recollection is that the program doesn't see individual print lines, but operates at the spool file level.

It would seem to me that what you want is to attach a data queue to the OUTQ and then when a spool file arrives on the data queue, you convert it and send it off. (Though someone mentioned a commercial product that did something like this.)

Or, if you have control of the generating program(S) you could get really fancy and go with a generalized approach and use OAR to replace the print file, minimizing changes to each program. The general purpose OAR handler would have to be table driven to know for each report layout how to identify the data fields. And that to me seem like a fair amount of coding, much of which had already been done with existing commercial products.

Sam

On 2/11/2015 9:02 PM, Steinmetz, Paul wrote:

I want thank everyone for all their input.
Because we are already using IBM Info Print Server, I think a combination of a "mapping object" or a "user mapping program" could be created that would do the splf to Excel conversion.
This program could either use an API or one of the TAATOOL commands, CPYSPLFDTA
The email would still be handled by IPS.

Has anyone ever created a "user mapping program", with an Excel conversion?

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