Printing attachments from outside of JDE E1

[DorotaGh]

Here is the requirement:
Users need to be able to print documents stored in a location on the network (PDF/EXCEL/Word format), and depending on a set of condition print the documents when they print a Work Order R48425. The attachements needs to be outside of the JDE and will be possibly in a few different formats - the user will be updating the attachement info daily/weekly.
Is there a way to print the attachement from outside of the JDE? Knowing only the location and name of the document? Is there a BF for that?

 

[BOster]

Not completely sure of the requirement but it sounds like you want to print documents stored outside of JDE, from within JDE, specifically when a UBE runs?

Short answer is yes it can be done - where there is a will there is a way. However, I don't think there is a default mechanism, BSFN, etc. that ships with JDE to do this. Well, at least none that I am aware of.

We do something similiar, we print MSDS sheets from within an APPL and also when a UBE runs. The MSDS sheets are in PDF format and are stored as BLOBs in a custom JDE table (where or how the documents are stored is not the issue, printing will be the challenge). However, to get this to work required finding a 3rd party library that would print PDFs and then writing a custom BSFN to interface to this 3rd party lib. If you are planning on supporting multiple formats (PDF, Word, Excel, JPG, etc.) then you will need to find a 3rd party lib or solution that supports all the formats you want to print and write a custom interface to the 3rd party solution or you will need to find multiple 3rd party printing solutions for each format you wish to print.

I have also done some printing of different type documents using Java (although it has been some time, and at the time even though some document formats like PDFs appeared to be supported it didn't truly work). If you can find a way to print from Java then you could probably build a document printing solution utilizing JDE's business services, although even this might require a third party lib. But with Java/Business Services it might be a little easier to build and deploy.

It has been years since I wrote our PDF printing solution so there is probably a ton of options now. Heck, there may even be a 3rd party plug-in solution for JDE to print anything you can think of. What I used for our PDF printing solution was the following:

XpdfPrint

 

[peterbruce]

DorotaGh,

You may be able to use the operating system of your server or fat client to do what you want, but that depends on your system configuration information that you have not provided.

Once again you will have to build the functionality yourself. The Execute External Program business function will run a command on the operating system of the machine on which it is running. So using this business function is dependant on where this functionality will run, which in turn is dependant on your system configuration.

As an example, if it is running on a windows box, you could create a bat file to print a file and take that filename as a parameter. Using the Execute External Program business function you would then run the bat file with the parameter.

 

[DorotaGh]

Thank you BOster and Peter! Your answers confirm what I thought: it will not be simple

!

 

[rblowe]

I have a solution that will print the work order + attachments. Catch is that the attachments are stored as media objects associated with the work order itself and can be physically stored as URL's or Files. It could probably be modified to pull 'outside' data files given a predictable pattern to follow. Let me know if you want more detail.