Automate IFS Printing via PL/SQL

Automatically printing an IFS report during a business transaction is one of the most common questions asked by customers. Many wants to avoid the print dialog since it adds few extra clicks to the process and therefore need to automate the printing. In some common documents like Customer Order, Purchase Order, Invoice, you have the option of automating the report but most of other reports are missing that.

You can use a custom event action or a custom menu of type PL/SQL to automate report printing. In this blog, I have listed down the main steps involves to print a Info Services report. By combining the available options in IFS, it is possible to design many varieties of reporting flows. For example, you can define only to email the report to the user, email and print both, bundle several reports together and print and so on.

On top of these settings, there are report rules where you can do much more stuff as well. With all its capabilities, IFS reporting framework has evolved as a powerful and versatile tool over the years.

Here I’ve described the basic PL/SQL logic which needs to be written to automate report printing without popping up the print dialog. It was mainly done for my own reference since this is something I often needed and thought of documenting properly. Before dig deep to coding, we’ll see the process of IFS report execution so it would give a better understanding about the logic which needs to follow in our code.

IFS Print request consist of 3 steps.

• Print Job – Print job is the holder of what being printed. It has the information about the printer and other related settings
• Archive – When you order a report with specific parameters, a record is created in the report archive. main outcome of the archive is the Result Key, which is the unique identifier of the executed report. Once you create a archive record, you can use that even later occasions to print the report until its cleaned up after the expiration date.
• Print Job Contents – This tells which archive record(s) are being printed, and which layout and other formatting settings should be used.

One print job can contain many print job contents. Print job content is depend on archive and there’s one to one relationship between them.

Now we’ll see some coding on how to create each one of there pieces. Given below are some great examples found in the IFS Community Hats off and credit goes to the respective authors.

Simple Create and Print Report

Following code block shows the steps you need to create and print a report. Report ID can be found by searching the report in the Report definitions. In this example I’m using the Work Instruction Report.

Finding the report parameters is a tricky thing but following SQL will help you to find the parameters to retrieve the report.

  SELECT report_id, column_name, column_title, column_value
   FROM   report_column_definition
   WHERE  report_id = 'SHOP_ORD_WI_REP'
   AND column_query IS NOT NULL
   ORDER BY column_id;

Adding Attributes to use in PDF_REPORT_CREATED Event

PDF_REPORT_CREATED event is a very popular and easy way of configure emailing the report to others. We add our own values for the event attributes and then use them in the event action. These values can be added while creating the print job. Below is a sample code for that.

It’s possible to add 15 event parameters and preferred file name to be used in the attachment using PDF_FILE attribute.

-- pdf_info_ VARCHAR2(32000); define pdf_info_ as varchar2
pdf_info_ := Message_SYS.Construct('PDF');
Message_SYS.Add_Attribute(pdf_info_, 'PDF_EVENT_PARAM_1', 'YOUR_VALUE1');
Message_SYS.Add_Attribute(pdf_info_, 'PDF_EVENT_PARAM_2', 'YOUR_VALUE2');
Message_SYS.Add_Attribute(pdf_info_, 'PDF_EVENT_PARAM_3', 'YOUR_VALUE3');
--..
--..
Message_SYS.Add_Attribute(pdf_info_, 'PDF_EVENT_PARAM_15', 'YOUR_VALUE15');
Message_SYS.Add_Attribute(pdf_info_, 'PDF_FILE_NAME', 'YOUR_VALUE15');

Client_SYS.Add_To_Attr('SETTINGS', pdf_info_, print_job_attr_);
-- Create Print job  
Print_Job_API.New(print_job_id_, print_job_attr_);

Scheduling Reports

We need to use report scheduling due to several scenarios

• Reduce the system impact if a large report runs during working hours.
• We might have to send report to users on an agreed date and time
• Avoid table mutations which might happen when report is created using custom events based on same table which report is gathering data from.

Using Archive_API.Create_And_Print_Report__ we can perform both create and print functionality which we discussed above. below code is the same as above but runs as scheduled task.

As I mentioned in the beginning, IFS reporting framework is a powerful tool with tons of capabilities and hope you’ve figured out one or two tricks from this post. Please leave your thoughts and share this if you think it could save someone’s day!