Prelude Invoice Reprinting / Print Spooling

[Chris Weitzel]

Does anyone have a cheap but elegant solution to capture Prelude print jobs for resubmission in case of a paper jam?

Here's what I'm trying to solve.  At end of day invoicing if we experience a paper jam or other printing problem, we simply tell Prelude to reprint all.  Problem solved, right?  Almost.  The issue is that we fax/email a large number of invoices and therefore, customers receiving that type of media get multiple copies every time we say "reprint".

If I'm in the office when this happens, I typically make a copy of the suspended (because printing stopped) AIX print job, clear the jam, delete the original job and then resubmit the copied job directly to the queue.  Doing so allows my user to tell the system that the job printed correctly and then we Process invoices, thus eliminating the duplicates.

It would be nice to queue the entire print job one time, move through Prelude's invoice printing process and then simply work with the queued print job however we need to get the invoices to print properly.

To the best of my knowledge, the only thing in my print queue (not adsopt) are the invoices that actually print on paper.  The other invoices get handled through adsopt and go on their way to vsifax or wherever they need to go.

I'm open to other possible solutions if you have a way of dealing with this.

Thanks.

Chris

[Tom Pellitieri]

Chris,

Are you printing batch invoices or mailed invoices?

We print invoices using the Continuous Printing process, but we have copies that get mailed once a week.

When we do our mailed invoices, a list is created named xxI-PRINTING, where xx is the port number of the session.  The list remains available until after you process your invoices.

If you are using the mailed invoice options, you could get and save a copy of the list.  After you process the original job, you can edit the copy of the list to eliminate the "good" items, and then create new null items in the MAIL.INVOICE file from the list.  Then, rerun the mailed invoice process. 

As a word of caution - a lot depends on your INV.PRINT program.  I have modified ours extensively, but the logic for using the MAIL.INVOICE file was not changed from Prelude.

--Tom Pellitieri

[precisonline]

Hey Chris,

If you have a paper jam on a specific printer, doesn't your OS "down" the printer until the issue is resolved?  In that case, the most that may be lost is a single document, which should be reprintable without reprinting the entire batch.  The fact that you mentioned "adsopt" suggests that you're using Optio, which (as I recall) splits up the Prelude print job into individual print jobs for each form.  Or is this not happening in your situation?

I would be interested to see what lpstat looks like for that printer when there's a paper jam or outage, or ... whatever.  Does it show a bunch of documents queued or just the one that fragged?

[Chris Weitzel]

Guys,

Thanks for the feedback.  The wheels came off here and I'm just now picking up the loose ends.

Tom, we are using Batch Printing.

Kevin:
- The printer eventually gets downed after the OS timeout period.

- I'm not exactly sure what Prelude is doing with our Invoices.  I know for certain, however, that a single file for ALL the printed invoices is sent to the printer because I can access it in /var/spool/qdaemon.
I've been saving a copy of that file (as a precaution) whenever deal with these jams so that I can manually resubmit that job to the printer if necessary.

- What appears to be happening is that during the print process, Prelude somehow splits the email and fax invoices from the hard copy invoices.  If or when that actually hits adsopt, I don't know, but I do know that the forms we are using are Optio because I've modified them.

All this said, I finally got my quote from Prelude to modify the /IP process so that in a reprint scenario, email/fax invoices will not be reprinted.  The cost is more reasonable than I thought.  I need to consider, however, whether the scope of the suggested mod is too limited.

If you have any other suggestions, I'm certainly open.

Thanks.
Chris

[Tom Pellitieri]

Well, if you don't mind the "REPRINT" notice on your invoices, you can always use the Invoice Batch Reprint to specify the invoices that need to be reprinted.  From the normal Invoice Printing screen (/IP), use the F6 key to bring this up.

Also, you can use the MAIL.INVOICE file if you're configured to mail additional copies of invoices.  There's a few customer fields you need to configure, and you need to make certain your invoice print routine handles mailed invoices the way you want.

Let me know if you want more details, although I won't be able to respond quickly this week - I'll be out of town, and have month/year end stuff to do.

--Tom 

[precisonline]

All this said, I finally got my quote from Prelude to modify the /IP process so that in a reprint scenario, email/fax invoices will not be reprinted.  The cost is more reasonable than I thought.  I need to consider, however, whether the scope of the suggested mod is too limited.

If they added a flag to /IP to suppress the reprint of emailed and faxed invoices, then I'd think it'd be a good mod.  If they unconditionally want to skip emailed and faxed invoices on a reprint then... maybe it's a bit too limited.  I also think Tom has a good point in that you can reprint a single document; identifying which document needs to be reprinted, however, can be a bit more challenging.  But if you have some way of identifying the document, you may not need the mod at all.