get clerk to act like report

[Brian K. White]

Interesting.

Well in this case timing is no problem. What this mystery process is 
doing is creating an xml file and sending it to a soap web service with 
curl.

The form printing part is the xml file needs to include some scanned 
document image files in base64 encoded tiff format, including some that 
aren't scans but I'm actually generating on the fly by essentially 
"print to tiff" by using printer "|pipeline":

[...]
x = close(xmlfile)
printer type "hplaser"
printer "|pcl2fax |openssl base64 >>" < xmlfile
form formname
printer flush ; printer reset ' surely the flush is redundant?
h = open(xmlfile,"wt")
x = seek(h,"0","2")
[...]

-- 
bkw


On 4/4/2013 5:25 PM, Nancy Palmquist wrote:
> Brian,
>
> I do this very thing and print checks and order forms and special
> documents all from clerk, depending on the data on the record.  It works
> great.
>
> We do this in "real time" as the user adds the record, or in batch mode
> - where the user just enters the data and then a batch process runs and
> prints all the reports in one pass.  We had interesting issues with
> managing printers and stuff, but it works.  (They have a bucket load of
> printers and we assigned the jobs to certain printers as they are
> entered, and then can grab just that batch of orders to process so the
> user that did the work and pick it off the printer and double check the
> contents.)
>
> I would say our biggest challenge with this was that we were printing
> filepro Forms and also documents and the sequence was an issue.
>
> Each thing would make a new spool file and I had to time them so they
> hit the spooler in the right order.  Many SLEEP commands in certain
> places to give the longer stuff time to process and it has been working
> great for years now.
>
> Good luck.
>
>
> Nancy
> On 4/4/2013 4:57 AM, Brian K. White wrote:
>> I want to run a report that just calls a call table once for each record.
>>
>> Except in that call table I want to issue form commands, so I need clerk
>> not report. Or else I need report with system clerk commands just to do
>> the forms, which I would rather avoid.
>>
>> Records are selected via selection set. So the main input processing is
>> just one line to call the call table. Except that by itself doesn't
>> actually work. It just sits there at entsel on the first record. If I
>> make the table:
>> ---top---
>> end
>> @entsel
>> call "mytable"
>> end
>> ---end---
>>
>> Then I can walk the records and the call table runs on each, by pressing
>> enter. But that's no good and I can't believe that adding a pushkey is
>> really the answer either :)
>>
>> So how can I construct an input processing and clerk command line
>> options so that clerk will essentially behave as report and run once per
>> selected record and then exit at the end of the selected records?
>>
>