Free Ticket to OAUG Collaborate 2011 – And the Winner is……

Thanks to everyone who posted a comment regarding what their biggest challenge has been/is with either BI Publisher Enterprise or BIP integrated with EBS. There were a total of 18 unique comments and they all were really insightful. See them all here. I plan to address as many as I can in upcoming posts as well as see to it that the BIP guys see your comments as well. Perhaps it will give them ammunition for enhancing the software!

There could only be one winner of the free ticket to OAUG Collaborate though and by drawing a name from a hat, that winner is…..

Glen Ryen

Glen’s comment was:

For the EBS version, I’d add some small points:

1) Template version control during development. It would be helpful if the seeded XML Publisher Administrator pages would display the file size, last updated date, and/or version number of the RTF or eText template that you uploaded. Had to work around with scripts.

2) Ability to generate PCL from the template, for printer tray control, duplex printing, etc. This would also eliminate the need for a third-party bolt-on to get a true hardware secured digital signature on AP checks. The workaround of mapping a specific drive letter to a plugged-in USB drive on the AP clerk’s PC is difficult to achieve when the apps and/or network infrastructure is hosted by a third party.

3) Reports development on pre-printed stationary. The examples you can find on the web work well, but the process is a lot more complex than it needs to be.

A couple comments on the comment itself….

For #1, I’m sure other people would be interested in learning how Glen accomplished the pseudo-source control solution that is being managed by scripts. Perhaps Glen could share with us?

For #2, PCL is not a native output type of BI Publisher. However, and I do not know all the details here, depending on when that PCL needs to actually be generated, you could ‘filter’ the outbound PDF to PCL using GhostScript. Using the xdodelivery.cfg file you can specify a filter command prior to delivery that will simply execute a binary against the output data. This binary could be Ghostscript, an example command line to convert PDF to PCL is:

gs -sDEVICE=ljet4 -q -dNOPAUSE -sPDFFitPage -dBATCH -sOutputFile=#o #i
Where #i is the input file and #o is the output file.

You could add -dDuplex to enable duplex printing or potentially write a filter yourself to insert the PCL code for the operations you want to enable. Unsure if this would help in this particular situation or not?

Good stuff, I will be contacting Glen via email separately to setup the OAUG Collaborate ticket. Thanks again for the comments, keep them coming.