FW: need help with dclerk

[Fairlight]

Confusious (Bruce Easton) say:
> I think I understand why you are using report the way you do and how it 
> works  well with OneGate, but one thing that I find people are rarely 
> clear about is what they are doing or plan to do with the current record 
> when considering different ways of doing things.  I think I know how you 
> are relating your "slots" to OG, but I'm not 100% sure what you are 
> doing with the control file records you speak of (storing data or 
> reading or neither).  And even though it seems obvious for the case 
> where your client is doing form printing, I can't determine, based on 
> what you said, that they are ever referencing a real field for the 
> current record when they are doing that.  (It would certainly seem so, 
> though.)  I would never make a decision about my approach to any filepro 
> solution without knowing whether or not I wanted/needed to write to/read 
> from/(or neither) the current filepro record where I might consider 
> standing - in fact - I think it's the first thing I consider; therefore 
> I recommend always including this piece of info when asking about 
> different methods.

The control file has two fields, date and time.  In my processing, I store
and write those two fields.  Let me explain the background for why...

OneGate uses a max_session_count.  Let's say you have a 16-seat fP license,
and you allocate 10 seats to OneGate use by setting max_session_count=10.
This leaves six seats available for other uses (ddefine, *cabe, in-house
*clerk, etc.).  Now, of that allocated max_session_count, that's 10 "slots"
in my locking system.  OneGate always uses the lowest available numbered
slot possible.  The slot number is available via %n (pneumonic: slot
[N]umber) for substitution into the commands you run.  So when I use
report against cgi_control, I use "-sr %n" as an argument/value pair.
This puts report on the record number that matches the slot.

So, by saving the time and date in the two fields in the slot records, I
update the slots' last-time-used information.  If I ever need to look into
how tightly we're running up against the top-end slots, say, how often do
we actually get up to slots 9 and 10, all I have to do is look at the
date/time in those slots.  If it's been two weeks back since slot 10 was
used, we're probably not maxing out.  If I check and see that slot 10 was
used 2hrs ago, and check in another four hours and it was used an hour
prior to the second check, it might be time to start allocating more seats
to web use so that we don't start deferring (ie., slowing) the speed at
which requests are processed by invoking the queued locking system, and it
may also therefore be time to look into buying more seats on the fP
license, if necessary.

As for the printing stuff...in this -particular- instance, it probably
wouldn't be used often in-house as opposed to on the web front-end.  Namely
because it's a notification of receipt of payment with bill details.
However, it's possible that a router fell over somewhere, the server was
being emergency rebooted, the power was out, etc., and authorize.net
approved a charge and bills were paid.  I track that information, and the
transaction ID from authorize.net is emailed in a report to the merchant
that states that relay receipt was not available during the request, so a
temporary hosted notification of approval was given instead.  If that
happens, the merchant can just look up the transaction ID and grab the
invoice number, and then manually print their notification for that invoice
number for their records to be complete.

In past cases, there has been existing in-house printing going on, which I
have had to basically fanagle into printwizard to PDF out to the browser
for bills and certificates and such.  

In most of the printing cases, the printing started off as in-house, and I
just mirrored it onto the web side.  In this case, it started off as a
notification requested by the merchant for the web side, but there is a
case (at least one) for needing to do it manually.

So the design fills both purposes.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.