Output no matter what's happening

[Brian K. White]

On 7/30/2014 12:17 AM, Mike Fedkiw wrote:
> I have a website that uses a file that I export from filepro to update the on hand every hour so my customers know what I have in stock. When doing the output on the invy file within filepro I'm changing nothing, just generating a file which is then automatically uploaded to the site which then updated the on hand whenever it receives the file. My concern is running into snags if someone happens to be adding items to the invy file or updating a record at the same time the timer says to generate the file for the website. Since I'm not changing anything on the output, shouldn't there be a way to run it whether there's records being added or updated anyway?

There is a read-only mode, a rreport command line flag -RO, which is 
supposed to allow you to run a report on all records in a file. I have 
had bad luck with getting it to actually work in practice though, at 
least in web/cgi applications. I don't remember the exact error any 
more. Segfault or filepro error I think, but with no actual reason for 
it since it was just a read-only report. It might have been some issue 
that's specific to the cgi environment vs a regular cron job or normal 
user process. You also want the -U and -A flags.

You can also just use -u -a and set PFSKIPLOCKED=1 in the environment, 
and any locked records will be skipped from that report. Or set it to a 
longer time like 20 and it when it hits a locked record it will wait up 
to 20 seconds for that record to become unlocked before proceeding. It 
will still skip it if it is still locked after 20 seconds. That record 
will not be included in that report that time.

My problem with -RO might also have been because I had lookups to other 
files in that report. I was doing no writing and I didn't even have any 
-p on any of the lookup commands, so it should have been fine, but, who 
knows. Wasn't worth tracking down since I didn't really need it to get 
the report I needed at the time, or any other time. Point is, if you 
have a simple report that just outputs from the file it's running out 
of, maybe the -RO works fine so it's worth a shot.

-- 
bkw