Printing workflow object
Besides the ‘Standard Print’ action which is commonly available in most inventories, AvantGard Trax also contains a more flexible Print mechanism, typically used for printing workflow object, which uses a dedicated configuration entity called ‘Print Table’ (Message model). An inventory for the ‘Print Table’ is integrated in the SA (System Administration) security profile.
Configuration
A new action called ‘PrintReport’ which triggers the ‘PrintTableRule’ rule, can be used for this more flexible way of printing workflow objects. This ‘PrintTableRule’ rule has 3 parameters :
print-fileName (optional) : specifies the file name pattern of the print output (may contain placeholders)
print-tableCode (optional) : specifies the print table that should be applied (overrides default behavior)
print-context (optional): extra filter matching with ‘context’ field of the print table (ignored when using print-tableCode parameter)
Within a ‘Print Table’ following attributes can be configured:
| Field | Content |
|---|---|
| Code | Code of the print table |
| Name | Name of the print table |
| Description | Description of the print table |
| Workflow | Optional: matching with the business workflow of the workflow object to print |
| Data owner | Optional: matching with the data owner of the workflow object to print |
| Language | Optional: matching with the language of the user who performs the print action |
| Target format | Optional: matching the target format of the workflow object to print. |
| Internal classification type | Optional: matching the internal classification type of the workflow object to print (selection list depends on selected workflow) |
| context | Extra filter criteria not originating from the workflow object provided via the parameter ‘print-context’ of the ‘PrintReport’ action |
| Format | Mandatory: output format used for printing, listing format definitions with format factory engine type BIRT or XSLT. |
| Print parameter | Optional: allowing to feed parameters to the output format which was selected (these parameters DO NOT override the parameters set on the format definition itself) |
How to configure Report or XSLT format definition is explained in chapter 4 of the Admin-Formats manual.
Printing
The ‘PrintReport’ action selects, based on the ‘Print Table’’ configuration, the print output format. This is done using the criteria workflow, data owner, language, internal classification type and context as configured within the ‘Print Table’ where only non-empty criteria of your ‘Print Table’ are considered. In case more than one ‘Print Table’ matched the most specific is used, in case no ‘Print Table’ matches an error message is shown (Unable to determine Print Table). This default behavior of determining the appropriate ‘Print Table’ and as a result print format can be overridden using the print-tableCode parameter.
The ‘PrintReport’ action allows multi selection of workflow items to print. But in this case it is possible that, during determination of the appropriate ‘Print Table’’ configuration, multiple (most specific) Print Tables are matched. An error message will be shown.
Also, if selected value objects for printing contain specific data differences (target encoding, place holder values used within the generated filename (like ownreference)), the values of the first selected value object are used for the output of the print.
The print result will :
be shown in a separate tab of the browser in case the extension of your output file (configured using the print-fileName parameter) equals ‘html’, ‘htm’ or ‘txt’
trigger a save as in all other cases