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Acucobol printing in the background.

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HaydenClark

Programmer
Oct 10, 2006
7
ZA
Hi.

I have a problem and for the life of me I cannot seem to find any solution. Let me colour in the picture prior to making any changes.

A couple of years ago we wrote a small application in Acucobol to serve as a printing interface for our business units. It's a simple listing of files on our VMS machine and the user can then selet a file and print it which then prints to the user's default printer via the AcuBenchPrintExecWBPrint module. This was fine until the user's decided that they want a little more.

We have since had to hook up the printing app to a menu which calls it and then expanded upong the functionality to include a dialog box to show the progress of printing rather large sets of files.

The final requirement is that if they wish to print large sets of files then they must be able to let it run in the background while they can simply click on the menu window again and continue with something else.

I have tried many things and have searched high and low but I cannot get the printing interface to sit quietly in the background and print a set of files without interferring with the menu screen. Everything works perfectly and I can even run different applications via the menu while the printing interface sits there, but as soon as I start the prinitng process then it switches the state of the menu screen and even if I do get to the menu again I still can't run any other applications from it.

The printing app is currently defined as an independent modelss window and is run in it's own thread from the menu.

Anybody out there got any ideas how I can get the printing applciation to print quietly in the background while the users return to the menu screen and continue with other work?

Thanks.
Hayden.

"Of all the things I've lost I miss my mind the most.
 
Hayden

I would suggest that you launch the printing process on a different (new) thread. Have you considered compiling the printing process as an EXE, and launch it a an entire separate process? You would lose that "percent complete" information going back to the menu. But it beats thread management.

Good Luck
Tom
 
No need to lose the percent complete. Just write it to a file from the print program, read and display in the menu program.

Tom Morrison
Micro Focus
 
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