Spooled File Viewing in RDP 8.0

Some new ability to view Spooled Files was added in RDp 8.0.

This work was done un-officially, by one of the developers as an interest
project in their free time at home.

It is included in the shipped release, but was never officially designed,
reviewed, or tested.
There is no mention of it in any of the documentation or help.

(Yes, it was intentionally included in the release . (:-)

As such, it is also not officially supported; so we won't be accepting PMRs
or APARs on it.

Yes, it could be improved, and hopefully will be.

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To briefly describe this Spooled File support:

In the Remote System Explorer view, under an IBM i Connection, there is a
new node for a Spooled File Subsystem..
It comes with a default filter, but you can also add your own spooled file
filters.
(Hhmm, trying it just now, I don't get a default filter supplied. So you
may have to right click on the subsystem to add a filter.)

The filters can be expanded to show as nodes in the tree, or you right
click on a filter and select the Show in Table to see the list of spooled
files shown in a separate table view of spooled files.

Selecting a spooled file, you can have its contents shown in a browser view

There are 2 tabs in the browser view that you can toggle between; which
show the contents in 2 separate formats.
The first is a text format. The content is retrieved as a print device
stream, and all but the text data is stripped out for showin.
(Known problem: It doesn't do a perfect job of filtering out all the
printer formatting codes. Notably, there is some garbage text shown on the
first line.)

The second is an image format. The content is retrieved one page image at
a time as a graphic image and shown.
You can scroll the view image around within the one page.
Pressing the page down/up keys should go to the next page, after requesting
and getting it from the IBM i.
(There are 2 vertical scroll bars; the inner for within the page, the outer
for selecting pages. But trying it just now, there doesn't appear to be a
slider in the outer scroll bar. Alas, another problem ...)

Its still a work in progress.



John Fellner, RDp Development
fellner@xxxxxxxxxx