Two for the road, Report from Clerk & Nonstandard Subtotals

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 10:33:22AM -0500, John Esak wrote:
> > Also, while you are at it, we use something we call destprt for the
> > 2nd half of this. You print the report to a file, and then destprt
> > will either print,email, fax, turn it to pdf, turn it to excel, turn
> > it to word doc, or display on screen. One nice part is that you
> > run a report, can display it on screen, then decide if you want to
> > print, fax,email etc. Every single report in our system runs through
> > this, and an excellent side benefit is that if we need to change
> > something, faxing for instance, we only need to change it in one
> > place.
> >
> > Brian White will make the code available to the list if anyone wants
> >it.
>
> Who wouldn't want this? :-) I look forward to the post. We have been
> doing this for about 10 years now. All of our customer required
> reports can be faxxed, emailed or printed, with filePro keeping
> the email and fax info on file for easy or defaulted retrieval.
> Occasionally, we have the need to send out .pdf attachments of our
> reports and forms which we accomplish with a rather excellent pcl2pdf
> function that we simply purchased. I'm sure there are the usual 100
> free linux versions of this tool. As for this kind of functionality in
> general, printing to various types of output, well, it was not in the
> scope of what I was trying to show, otherwise the message would have
> been even longer than it was! So, Brian's disclosure of Howie'e code
> on how to do it will be most welcomed by the list I'm sure. Thanks! To
> bad you can't issue such orders to Howie, himself... :-)

Now, now, John; your snark level is climbing a bit, there.  ;-)

Yet Another Enhancement Idea:

destprt sounds like an extension of Fourgen's old AtPrintTime idea,
which used generic printcodes, and translated them in the printer
output script -- a much more portable (report-wise) approach to getting
printouts out on multiple types of printers (as long as you confined
yourself to the least common denominator.

The other extension I'd add to it would be what RealWorld does with
reports.  It puts *everything* it prints in a queue, tagged with the
date, time and owner name, so that you can reprint it later if the
printer screws up... on, say, a posting report?

Neat idea, and another thing filePro doesn't do natively.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

      If you can read this... thank a system adminstrator.  Or two.  --me