PSF/6000 separator page exit - How does it work?
ITEM: RTA000088606
Q:
ABSTRACT: PSF/6000 separator page exit - How does it work?
Can I print different addressee info on each copy?
SEARCH ARG: PSF/6000 EXITS
TOPIC THREAD: PRINT
AFP
PSF6000
..
Customer is using the pcl2afp transform of PSF/6000 to prepare print
jobs. The customer needs to print multiple copies of each print job
with the only difference between the print jobs being the first page
which contains mailing information. Today the customer handles this
by sending multiple jobs to the printer (and transforming basically the
same data multiple times)
It seems to me that we could reduce network traffic and processor time
spent transforming the same data multiple times by customizing the
separator page exit. I have read the print administration and update
guides and am still unable to conclude whether this is possible.
From the reading I understand that when invoked the separator page
page will execute before each copy of a job. I also understand that the
SEPARATOR_EXITDATA structure is accessed to obtain the ADDRESSn fields
that get included on the separator page. I am unclear as to how the
data structure get 'loaded' with the variable data. The manuals suggest
that this information must get passed on the print submission command
but it seems that that would cause the address fields to be the same on
all separator pages since you cannot pass an array of information in
this way. I have printed copies of the separator page source code but
since my C programming skills are limited they have been of little help.
Questions:
1) Is there a more complete overview explanation of how the separator
page exit works and how and when the data structures get loaded?
2) Is it possible to have different addressee information printed on
each separator page within a job? How is this done?
3) Can we setup a flat file with the array of addresses and have
this file be the input to the separator page data structure? Since the
array would need to be different for each job could we key off the job
name to select the flat file containing the distribution list for that
job?
4) Is the approach I have documented above a reasonable way to achieve
printing a different address on each copy of a job. Is there an
alternate approach you would recommend?
Thanks for your assistance.
A:
Here's the response I received from Development. I hope this helpsĒ
There is no additional documentation on any of the exits, other
than what exists in the PSF/6000 pubs and the headers of the exit
code. You can look in the exit header file for more information on
the parameters that can be passed to an exit.
The copy count exists in the separator page exit, and is incremented
each time the exit is executed. So, it is initialized to 1, and
then incremented so that the next time the exit is used, the count is
2, and so on. So you can use this field to determine the copy count.
You can pass address information to the exit in a number of ways. The
most obvious are the -oaddress1-4 (if you have 4 or fewer copies), or
the -opassthru parameter. You can pass up to 1024 bytes in the
-opassthru, and parse it in the exit. Or you can pass in your flat
file name, and open, parse, and close it in the exit. There is some
formatting done by the exit; you are probably better off using existing
areas for your data than to try to format your own.
Regards...
S e a r c h - k e y w o r d s:
AIX PSF/6000 EXIT SEPARATOR VARIABLE psf/aix address multiple header
trailer
WWQA: ITEM: RTA000088606 ITEM: RTA000088606
Dated: 05/1999 Category: XPSF6000
This HTML file was generated 2000/11/30~13:34:03
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