Re: Archiving Spool Files. -- MIDRANGE-L

I wrote a PC program to do something very similar.  I wrote this thing
to pull reports off a McDonnell Douglas PIC system onto a PC servers
HD, then it would go through each report looking to see what report it
was, via a little database that contained up to 3 lines per reports, stating
the beginning column and line number, and a text string that was to be
contained there.  Another field in this database was the file name it was
to archive it to.

Basically, there were a group of reports it would go through (10 to 20 in
each group) and it would then copy each file to this new file, but only if
all the reports were there.  If any report was missing, it wouldn't do anything
but print an error to a file that could be checked later.

Then there was another small program that would transfer these new archive
files to the optical server directory where they would be automatically
saved to optical.

This was not that hard to accomplish (writing the COM download driver
to download the files was the biggest pain) and after it was done it was
a no brainer.  After every month end was done someone kicked off this
program (written in Delphi) that would do all this, and then look to see
if any errors occurred.  If no errors, they were done.  If there were errors
they found out why the report either wasn't generated or why someone
moved or deleted it.

With a little thought and a little programming, something like this can be
done with not much effort, and is very maintainable (I made it so anyone
could add new entries to the data base and make new archive files, or
add or remove spool files from the archive just by adding, changing or
deleting records).

Regards,

Jim Langston

janusz.prusaczyk@big.pl wrote:

> Hi!
> We use SpyView from Magellan and we are really happy with it! Allan surely
> can tell you more, I only want to say that once we setup it - it keeps
> working. But if all that you want is just to burn your reports on a CD in
> *.txt format, maybe it would be enough to install Operations Navigator on a
> PC with CD Recorder and drag&drop reports. If you want more user friendly
> names of files, you can write a Perl script that will open each one in turn,
> check what it is (easy with query/400 output with title page, possible for
> every report) and change it's name. Than just mark all spool files, drag on
> PC's disk, run your script and copy to catalog for given day on CD. You can
> go a step further, and make your script to convert all Polish letters better
> than this transfer does, if your reports contain Polish letters of course
> ;-)
>

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