Partner TechTip: Transform Spool Files into Meaningful Information PDF Print E-mail
Tips & Techniques - Database
Written by Duncan Kenzie   
Thursday, 20 September 2007

Article Sponsor

Business Computer Design Int l, Inc. (BCD)

Address
950 York Road, Hinsdale, IL, USA, 60521-9717
Phone
630-986-0800
Fax
630-986-0926
E-mail
Website
http://www.bcdsoftware.com/

BCD makes it easier for you to modernize iSeries - System i - AS400 applications and business processes. Just as we have for over 10,000 clients, our advanced and tightly integrated solutions will take you as far as your business requirements demand and your imagination permits.

Trust BCD and our solutions. You'll soon see why thousands of organizations prefer BCD's proven modernization solutions, and over 35 industry awards have been awarded to BCD for software excellence. Applications built with BCD solutions transact billions of dollars worth of business and automatically manage millions of report pages and documents with the highest degree of reliability and a minimal amount of maintenance.

For 30 years iSeries - System i and prior IBM midrange users have come to depend on BCD for innovative and affordable modernization solutions to improve their business and end-user productivity. We're a recognized industry leader who delivers easy-to-use, well supported and well documented solutions. And, we continually monitor client feedback, and reinvest significant amounts of revenue into research and development.

Try our solutions, become a client, and we promise to keep delivering the most innovative, affordable and high-quality solutions. And, we further promise to give you the best technical support the industry has to offer to ensure your success.

This commitment has led to very high client satisfaction and industry award recognition. We are also proud of the following:

- BCD is a Charter member of IBM's System i Developer Roadmap.
- BCD is a Member of IBM's System i ISV Advisory Council.
- We are an IBM Advanced Business Partner.
- IBM and BCD have signed a distribution agreement that lets IBM distribute WebSmart and Catapult with all System i shipments and all i5/OS V5R4 upgrades.
- To date we have proudly received 35+ Industry Awards for Software Excellence including multiple:
- Search400.com Products of the Year - Gold Award Winners.
- IBM System i Magazine Honor Roll Awards.
- System i News Editors and Readers Choice APEX Award Winners.
- Showcase Products Excellence Award Winners.
- COMMON Conference Award for Best Traditional Lab... and others.
- Over 10,000 worldwide customers have become successful with our solutions.
- Over 30,000 software solutions have been implemented worldwide.
- Over 100 International and Domestic Business Partners distribute BCD solutions.
- We are a long standing member of COMMON's Expo Advisory Council.
- We are System i News / Network's longest running consecutive advertiser. Every month for 24 years.
- BCD is MC Press / Showcase's longest running advertiser.
- And one of the longest consecutive IBM Tech Conference participating vendors.
- We are COMMON Conference Expo's longest participating vendor. Over 30 consecutive conferences.

Try BCD's award winning solutions for yourself. Call to discuss your business needs and we'll prove how we can modernize your business applications and processes more affordably and with greater ease. We look forward to hearing from you and having the opportunity to earn your confidence and trust.

Thank you for considering BCD and our solutions.

 

 

 

Easily generate summary data, charts, graphs, KPIs, or graphic reports such as invoices.

BCD's Catapult is a business intelligence solution with a difference. Because it has tight integration with BCD's application modernization suite, it delivers meaningful information to users through more distribution channels than comparable products.

For example, you can transform text-based greenbar reports into summary data, charts, graphs, KPIs, or graphic reports such as invoices and have Catapult automatically push these to Nexus, a secure Web-based portal. Catapult's automatic indexing features make it easy for portal users to find documents. For example, you can extract information from key parts of a report, such as an invoice number or customer name and have Catapult create index entries for these values. Within Nexus, users can search for invoices or customers using the Enterprise Content Manager (ECM). And because the ECM provides a high degree of granularity in securing documents, you can create flexible and secure schemes for providing or restricting access to distributed documents.

Catapult is simple to implement yet provides a comprehensive set of features for automated report distribution and transformation. Catapult monitors System i output queues for the arrival of new spool files. If those files match selection criteria (called "grab rules") that you define, they're captured and processed for distribution. Catapult does most of its work on a PC (either dedicated or shared by other apps). This approach frees up valuable System i resources and offloads processing to inexpensive PCs.

One of the major benefits of Catapult is the elimination of printed paper costs. The Gartner Group estimates that organizations spend seven cents for every printed page. By using Catapult to electronically distribute documents instead of printing them, your organization can potentially save thousands of dollars each year.

Catapult can transform spool files in many ways:
  • Split reports into smaller segments.
  • Email whole reports or segments as attachments or email body content.
  • Create HTML files from whole reports or segments.
  • Create PDFs from whole reports or segments and, optionally, email or archive those.
  • Fax whole reports or segments to distribution lists.
  • Print whole or part of report on a network printer.
  • Transform a detail report into a summary, chart, graph, or KPI.

Catapult also works with network files (on either the IFS or other shared network drives) to transform and distribute them. For example, you could have an Excel spreadsheet that gets automatically emailed to a group of email addresses whenever it's archived on a drive.

Let's look at an example that transforms an invoice to a PDF file, archives it on a network drive, and emails it to a recipient.

Catapult lets you define rules for grabbing spool files. Each rule can have many components. Figure 1 shows the spool file selection component of my example rule, which grabs a spool file for user KWILSON with user data of KRWINVINQ.

http://www.mcpressonline.com/articles/images/2002/PartnerTechTipCatapultSept112007V5--09210700.png

Figure 1: Here's my example of spool file selection for an invoice spool file.

Catapult shows the actual spool file contents (see Figure 1), so I have a visual confirmation of my selection.

Next, I transform the file into a PDF with a forms overlay in order to produce a professional-quality invoice (Figure 2). Notice the file name specified: &n.pdf. The &n is a placeholder for the file name.

http://www.mcpressonline.com/articles/images/2002/PartnerTechTipCatapultSept112007V5--09210701.png

Figure 2: Download and transform the spool file.

In addition to transforming to a PDF, I've also chosen to archive the file on a network drive named \\esdi2003\excel\zztemp\Catapult.

Next, I specify who to email this report to (Figure 3). In this example, it's going to my email address at work and to my Gmail account for confirmation. The Email Subject is "Harmonics Invoice."


http://www.mcpressonline.com/articles/images/2002/PartnerTechTipCatapultSept112007V5--09210702.png

Figure 3: Email the invoice.

Catapult also lets you split and email reports to distribution groups by extracting a piece of information from the report and using that as the key for finding the corresponding email address.

Once the Catapult server polls the System i and finds a matching spool file, it runs the grab rule for it, and I get an email in Outlook (Figure 4).

http://www.mcpressonline.com/articles/images/2002/PartnerTechTipCatapultSept112007V5--09210703.png

Figure 4: I receive the email created by Catapult

The PDF is attached to the email. Figure 5 shows the resulting attractive invoice, with our corporate logo as a watermark.

http://www.mcpressonline.com/articles/images/2002/PartnerTechTipCatapultSept112007V5--09210704.png

Figure 5: This is a professional-looking invoice!
This example is just one of countless ways you can transform and distribute spool files and network files. Catapult gives you more options for getting relevant information to the right people...without cutting down more trees.


Duncan Kenzie
About the Author:
Duncan Kenzie is President and CTO of ExcelSystems Software Development Inc. Duncan’s company is responsible for product development and technical support for BCD International Inc.’s (www.bcdsoftware.com) product line. Duncan has a BA in English Literature from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, and enjoys writing on a variety of subjects. Duncan is a frequent public speaker and has been writing articles about the midrange platform since 1985. He has also been involved in producing programmer productivity and business intelligence tools for 25 years and is the technical lead on products such as WebSmart, WebSmart PHP, and Nexus, leading System i Web tools.  Duncan still enjoys programming, and studies in leadership and self-improvement. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Read More >>
  No Comments Have Been Posted.

Discuss...
Related Articles
User Rating: / 0
PoorBest 
< Prev   Next >
[ Back ]
   MC-STORE.COM