Hi, We have been using PDF995 to create PDF files and to automatically attach the document to an email, which has the email address populated from the contact. This all works well, we managed to fully automate everything by controlling the .ini file, but have run into a problem with Citrix. The pdf995.ini file (which controls all of the automation) only exists on a per machine basis, not a per user basis. Obviously, the Citrix box will have a lot of concurrent users, so now we are scratching our heads how to solve this. Sending the wrong document to the wrong customer is a bit of a nightmare scenario. Ideas much appreciated… Many thanks Meint
In order to be absolutely bulletproof I think you would have to serialize the access to the pdf995-printing function from within Navision, which could be done by issuing a locktable to some arbitrary table in Navision designed for the purpose. And this is unfortunate if you have many users printing pdf-files. Otherwise you would probably have to make multiple installations of the pdf995 program/printerdriver, one installation for each user, and I don’t know if this i possible.
Hi Allan, Thanks for your reply. I think your suggestion would be a last resort really as it still does not guarantee a 100% bullet proof solution. The problem is that you never know when the file has been created (external program after all) and when you need to release the lock. We have looked at installing the program seperately for each user, but not really sure how to do this. It would be great if we could make it work though, at $10 per user it is great value for money… Regards Meint
How do you automatically attach the pdf-file to the mail if you don’t know when it is created?? This is what I do from my code: - Print report usingg pdf995 printerdriver. - Monitor pdf995 directory until pdf-file is created by printerdriver (I have a timeout, so I don’t wait indefinately). - Create mail, attach PDF, send mail. I don’t use the locking-stuff though because I only have one user running a particular “send a lot of mails to different people” job at a time.
I do not completely understand your problem. The location of the ini file, or what is in it?
Hi Allan and Erik, We do this slighty differently, we write to the .ini file and then automatically print the report to the pdf995 driver without intervention. Basically, the process works as follows: 1) Make a backup copy of the pdf995.ini 2) Write the required parameters to the pdf995.ini 3) Run the report, which then picks up the settings from the pdf995.ini file (e.g file name, whether to launch the email client, name of email recipient etc) 4) Delete the pdf995.ini file and restore the backup we made earlier. The problem now is that the pdf995.ini file is on a per machine basis, not a per user basis. This is obviously going to cause problems when two users try to send sales quotes simultaniously. Allan, could you possibly share a code snippet with e.g. how you would go about sending a sales quote to somebody? It would be interesting to see how you solved this problem. PDF995 support are now also looking into this for us, and are possibly able to provide us with a version where every user has his/her own pdf995.ini file. We have also looked at pdfmailer which does work ok, but is roughly 15 times more expensive, and with about 150 users it makes a bit of a difference. Many thanks Meint