PDFingMailer News Letter #3 - 3rd July 2000 =========================================== We are back from our holidays. I had a wonderful time in Arizona and my wife liked the idea of living in Tucson, but now I am back to work in London! PDFingMailer continues its progress. Thanks again to all of you who have registered your copy of PDFingMailer, it allows us to continue enhancing the product. The current release (PDFingMailer v1.2.0.6) has been stable since the 5th May 2000. The NT Service version was also released at this time. The latest beta version v1.2.0.7h will be in test throughout July. The biggest improvement in the beta version is the reduction of PDF file sizes. For example a report of 1856 pages (compiler listings) that created a PDF file of 10,279KB using v1.2.0.6, is only 6,238KB using v1.2.0.7h When using the compression option the PDF file size can be further reduced from 6,238KB to 2,216KB. A number of new features have been included in response to users suggestion. These include new "tags" for user-print-information, new mark-up options and PDF file compression for SCS spooled-files. For details of the new beta features see: http://www.PDFing.com/BetaChanges.html We have been asked about encrypting the PDF files. That is, is it possible to set different passwords for reading, printing and changing the PDF file after encryption. I have identified a software house that could license the libraries to me, but at the moment the cost would be an additional 500.00 USD. Would anyone be prepared to pay that much? There are some frequently asked questions that relate to programming the AS/400. I have summarised my answers below. We intend to publish this on our web-site, but we would welcome your feedback. Regards David Fowle AS/400 Programming for PDFingMailer =================================== These notes are intended to clarify how to use AS/400 APIs in conjuction with PDFingMailer. Command: CHGUSRPRTI (Change User Print Information) ------------------- This IBM supplied command is used to specify the information that is sent with the spooled-file data to PDFingMailer, for example: CHGUSRPRTI USER(*CURRENT) TEXT('EMA=dfowle@PDFing.com') The user-print-information must be set BEFORE the spooled-file is created, that is before the printer-device file is opened. If you want to set the user-print-information from within the report-program itself, you will have to call a CL program that will in turn execute command CHGUSRPRTI, the following code is an example of a program that can be called from a high-level-language program: /* CL PROGRAM: SET UPI */ PGM PARM((&USER)(&TEXT)) DCL &USER *CHAR (10) /* USER-PROFILE */ DCL &TEXT *CHAR (256) /* USER-PRINT-INFORMATION */ CHGUSRPRTI USER(&USER) TEXT(&TEXT) ENDPGM You should also be aware that as user-print-information is an attribute of the user-profile, concurrent jobs for the same user-profile can both change the user-print-information and cause spooled-files to be created with unexpected user-print-information. Duplicating spooled-files ------------------------- Once the spooled-file has been opened, the user-print-information cannot be changed. Executing CHGUSRPRTI again will have no effect. Nor are there any APIs that can change the user-print information. However it is possible to create a duplicate spooled-file with different user-print-information. IBM supplies several spooled-file APIs to allow for duplication of spooled-files. The PDFingMailer AS/400 utilities contain command: SNDPDFSPLF for this purpose. I wil (soon) release a new version of these utilities which will include a program (DUPPDF) that can be called from a HLL program for the same purpose. Of course you must execute the command AFTER you have closed the spooled-file to be duplicated. Using the remote-queue name parameter (v1.2.0.7 & Beta versions only) ------------------------------------- You can change the remote-queue name so that it can also include the "tags" that are supported in the spooled-files user-print-informatiom. For example: CHGOUTQ RMTPRTQ('Q+EMA=youraddress@yourdomain+EDN=YourDocument') Will mean that all documents written from this queue will be mailed to: youruser@yourdomain as a document named: YourDocument. Pleasenotice that the tags are prefixed with the (plus). If tags are already specified in the spooled-file, the corresponfing tags in the queue-name will be ignored. Splitting Spooled-files. ------------------------ I wonder if anyone has thought about splitting long reports (by customer or salesperson for instance) into separate spooled-files. I can see this being done either on the AS/400 or the Windows PC. However it depends where the data-base (say from customer to e-mail address) is being kept, I imagine the e-mail database would always be on the AS/400. However it might be possible to send PDFingMailer a special spooled-file containing the data-base to be used and the text that causes report splitting. In which case PDFingMailer could do the split itself.