Printer file overrides for Accounts Payable Check printing

[John_Dickey]

Just a question for the list. Does anyone else have a need for printer file
override capability on printing Accounts Payable checks? I have a situation
where an office, still using preprinted check forms, wants to switch from
multiple part continuous forms to single sheet forms that feed through laser
printers. They will need more than 1 copy. So I need to set the copies to
3 (in this case) on the spool file. But even though P04572 is a dreamwriter
program and has versions, JDE does not look at/use the print overrides on
those versions. Other offices still are using the impact printers. So I
cannot universally change the S04572 printer file to get 3 copies for this 1
office. Sure, we can manually change the spool file, but that is a pain,
and means the checks won't automatically come out printing like they do
today.

Now here is the real capper. JD Edwards does do a Change Spool File
attributes command within the A/P check printing process. Processing option
6 on P04572 contains a form type value, and guess what, you have to do a
Change Spool File attributes to get that value into the spool file. So why
not just drop processing option 6 and use the darn versions printer file
overrides? That way you can do more than just the form type. Look at
program X045721 and its description. That program gets executed today as
part of the A/P check process.

Not having much luck convincing Support to consider this. But maybe if a
bunch of us customers start asking for this, they might listen to us. It
would actually be a fairly simple change (they even have the program to do
this, just needs to handle a few more parameters). This design may have
made sense 25 years ago when everyone printed on multiple part continuous
forms, but that is not today's printing environment.

Food for thought.

John Dickey
Accounting Systems Administrator
White-Rodgers, division of Emerson
8100 West Florissant Avenue
P.O. Box 36922
St. Louis, MO 63136-9022
314-553-3067

 

[tpayne]

Good point John, but you will probably find that these days most companies are using external software to do the physical printing of checks, invoices and other documents.

We use Optio for all our external (and some internal) documents, my last job used to use CreatePrint, and there are also other packages.

The simplest solution might be to just bite the bullet and modify the CL to put in a printer override.

 

[curryj]

We don't actually have this requirement, because we use CreatePrint, as Tony Payne has suggested, for most of our forms processing.

However, I do support your position, as it irritates me when I find that JDE has not followed its own standards. Now that I've said that I'm not sure that's the right way to say it, but what I mean is that users are familiar with the DREAM Writer functionality, and when they are confronted with it, they ought to be able to assume that it is actually going to work, and work the same way every time.

It's a great tool. Why don't they use it?

 

[mnarewec]

John
We use Adobe Central Output Server (formerly JetForms) to do that. In our
case, we rarely need any modification in JDE. We just pass the spool file
to that third party software and it does the trick.



Cheers!
___________________
Marsh R Narewec
STC Computer Services