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Spool Management

Current capabilities:

  • The Spool Management Module is designed to enable the user to capture an image of spool entries (reports) onto disk so that it can be viewed or reprinted at a later time. After these spool entries have been saved on disk, they can be archived on to tape to free up disk space. Then at a later time the user can restore reports selectively to be printed or viewed.

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  • With this design the user can capture spool images on to disk and then to tape without actually printing the hard copy and filling the registers. Another application would be to capture monthly reports, which the user may or may not want to print but could be kept on tape for reference at a later time if and when it is required.

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  • Automatic Spool Capture

  • The capture of the spools is set up as a scheduled job, which runs once a day. This routine will allow the user to select which spool entries to be captured based on the spool attributes (i.e. spool file name, job name, user data, etc.). When the entry is captured it also catalogued in a file which retains all of the spool attributes, as well as where it is stored on disk.

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  • Then when the entries are saved on to tape the Spool Management system keeps track of which tape the spool is stored on. The amount of time that the spool entry is kept on disk is user defined and can be set differently for each type of spool entry.

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  • Save Strategy

  • The tape backup routines are different from the normal back up routines to allow the user easy access to recover spool images over a long period of time. This would allow the user to recover all registers of a certain type for an entire year from one tape instead of having to get out the twelve monthly back up tapes for that year (assuming they are still around). In an effort to ensure a proper back up, these images are also backed up to the monthly backup tapes in case anything happens to the spool image backup tape.

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Spool Management

The Spool Management module only captures spool entries that were produced by ‘AS/400/IBM i’ programs. It does not capture PC based spool entries that are printed using virtual printing through client Access. It should also be noted that this module supports spool files up to 198 characters wide. This is the number of characters that fit on standard wide paper (15 inch) printing at 17 characters per inch (compressed).

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