Archive jobs from Print Manager

I'm sure it is possible to "archive" them by having a script copy the $LAWDIR/print/{username}/{jobname} folder to an archive path with a datestamped name. However, I think you would have to access them without using the application, which may not be very helpful, depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more challenging it appears to be. You could create a script as I mentioned above, but I'm not sure how you would trigger it. In Unix it could run very frequently under cron, but I don't know that there's a way to identify when the job is "done" so the files were all complete. Also, if you ran it less often, it would be possible to miss a job if someone ran it multiple times in quick succession.

Are you needing to do this for all jobs, or for specific jobs for a certain user? If the latter, are they scheduled jobs or ad-hoc jobs? If there are specific jobs, and they are scheduled jobs, you could probably script a process to create a new job (date-stamp based) and then run the job. It would take some fiddling, but it should be possible.

There are couple options that I can think of:

1. Copy the reports to an archive directory as Woozy mentioned -- but as he also mentioned, are not going to be accessible by Lawson
2. Copy the reports to the current directory with a different name and do a loadrpts which will make them accessible via Lawson
3. We utilize a 3rd party software called Cypress that we use as our report retention application.

 

What platform are you on? We are on windows and we push out adobe reader to our users. Those of our users who need to save reports as part of their business processes have their portal Default Report Type (under user options) set to pdf. This causes the report to open as a pdf. If they want to save that report, they just save the pdf to a specific folder of their choosing (e.g. a folder on a network drive that they have set up with specific permissions for their business area).

This would be for all users. There doesn't seem to be some sort of trigger available in Lawson 10 to kick off some sort of script when the report has been completed. We can't have an external script always running in the background as I am sure we would miss files as users run jobs/reports at the same time.

We are on Windows and we already set the report types to PDF. We don't want the users controlling this, IT needs to control the archiving.

As stated earlier, we have a 3rd party solution called Cypress that acts as a report retention application. Having something like this you can then set up the Report Distribution within the job itself to send the report to this retention application.

We've done it, but it's cumbersome, at least the way we do it, so we only do it on jobs that make it worthwhile.

Each job that needs report history saved must be set up as a multistep job. The first step saves the print files from the previous run, the second is the actual Lawson job, e.g. PR530.

The first step is a user token that runs a command file that in turn runs a VB script. The script creates a new folder to store the previous run's files, named the same as the original folder, but with a time stamp appended. The report files for the previous run are copied to the new folder. Finally, the loadrpts utility is run to load the new folders into the user's report list so they'll show up in their print manager.