Re: User Options for WRKOUTQ? -- MIDRANGE-L

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Rowe" <martin@dbg400.net>
To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 9:22 AM
Subject: Re: User Options for WRKOUTQ?


> On Thu, 2002-01-24 at 14:43, Mike Naughton wrote:
> > I apologize if this has been covered before -- is there any
way of adding
> > user-defined options to the WRKOUTQ screen? Specifically, my
boss is
> > looking for a way to select a spool file, copy it to a data
file, and then
> > download the data file to his pc.  His plan is to set up a
generic data
> > file and a generic download, so those pieces would be the same
every time,
> > but he wants to be able to look at his output queue and pick
the report he
> > wants to download.
> >
> > Has anyone done anything like this?
> >
> > Thanks very much,
> >
> > Mike Naughton
>
> Hi Mike

My godawful expensive software will select all the files in an
outq that match just about any combination of outq parameters you
can imagine, copy each to a database member, download the member
to a pc using the job, file, userdata, or other entry as a name,
converting to ASCII of course, and on the pc side it will read the
reports that don't have names and recognize them from context
entries and rename them, append multiple files of the same name if
you choose, then build indexes on data in the report if you want
(invoice number, customer name, combinations of different fields)
then put it in an archive you select (AP, AR, My favorite reports)
cross index the indexes if you desire (all invoice numbers
regardless of date, all customer numbers regardless of report or
date) , then give you instant page at a time access thru green
screen (5250, 3270, Unix, or telnet), as well as a windows client
from anywhere on the net, or a web browser, and you can look up an
invoice in under a second, select and  reprint part or all of the
report to a pc printer or an as/400 printer, include forms
overlays, email as text, html, or pdf, apply a data extraction
template and convert to spreadsheet, database, or html , filter
out the data you want (balances over 5,000 and invoices more than
30 days old) , and link purchase orders to scanned invoices,
program an invoice lookup screen on the as/400 that access the
archive for a particular invoice, and does a couple of other
things I have forgotten or don't even know about since the kids
took over the programming, stores up to 160 million pages on a
$300 pc hard drive, and costs half or two thirds of the
competitors but I'm raising the damn price because people think it
must be a yugo to be so cheap (and we are BETTER than all of the
competition), and if you can think of something else it should do
call me, I want to continually improve my product. Runs on Windows
88/SE as a server, or NT as a service (including on the attached
PC processor of constantly changing name inside an AS/400 I mean
iSeries which we know is really an RS/6000 pretending to be a
System/38) And 13 years experience and 1,000 installs, mostly
midrange but some mainframe and Unix. Download from anywhere, view
anywhere, send anywhere.

And if you want to get those reports to the PC faster than anyone
else in the world, we have a SCSI tape emulator download product
that is faster than any network you have ever seen (for large
files, a lot of tiny files will beat it).

But I agree sometimes a free or low-cost utility will do the job.
It depends on how much you need, how much support you want, etc.
(In case anyone wonders, I am being completely sincere - sometimes
the free or shareware solution will do the exact job you want, and
you should use it. I do.)

( I meant godawful expensive versus free, not versus the other
nearly-complete solutions out there.)

And for guys who don't need to do anything more than save spool
files to tape and return them to the AS/400, SAVEOUTQ is a great
product and real inexpensive, last time I checked. (That's
somebody else's product.) I hear ROBOTREPORTS , which I think is
much more expensive than SAVEOUTQ but does more stuff (I think) is
a pretty good product also.

And as a direct competitor to us, Metafile is an excellent
product, I think it is more expensive and it lacks a couple of
features we think can be important to some people. (We lack their
full text indexing, which we think of as useful for smaller
reports, but we will be adding that soon.)

I add all this detail because I think perhaps your user may want
to do something more with their request than just download the
report. They might not.

Brad Jensen
LaserVault
www.elstore.com