Retrieving RDL CSV files via FTP

[gbell]

I'm looking for a better way of retrieving RDL CSV files from UNIX/MIMS to a local or network drive.

Ideally I would like a Windows look and feel dialogue box from where the MIMS User can only see his/her output on the UNIX server, or from a central holding point on a NT fileserver. After clicking/highlighting the report to retrieve, the user is then presented with the save as options where they would enter their local or network drive. For this to work seamlessley the Dialogue Box would already know the MIMS User details so they don't have to log in again.

Any ideas you care to share?

 

[PhantomPhil]

How about a different approach - have the RDL produce the file as a report, and get Mims to email the report to the user?
Or if the record length is greater than 132, write to the file, and also write the Mims email header tags to the file which can then be processed by the Mims email script (mimsmail.pl) which is just a fancy script to call Unix sendmail.

 

[moekti]

In my site, we are using field BANNER in the screen Report Request Selection, where the user can write the ftp's destination (network drive) if they want to get the softcopy of their report result (including csv format). We're using some unix and perl scripts for capturing the destination and only non blank destination that contains specific character ("\&quot will be continue processed. The next script will validate the destination and the report name, comparing with our ftp destination list and report list. The ftp destination list contains all valid destination server names and its network drive share names. The report list contains all report names that can be ftp'ing with its output record length. This is used for unblocking the report result file prior to ftp. Also we modified the batch.ctl, preparing default user/passwd for the ftp connection, etc.
Hope this help.

 

[payers]

At our site we use the Samba product. What Samba allows us to do is share Unix directories across a windows environment seamlessly. A user is then able to access their files in the Unix directory after setting up a drive mapping in Windows explorer. Samba shares can be set up secured to a list of named users or left open for all to access. There are a number of different options with Samba and we are only using a portion of it's capabilities. It is a freeware product readily available for most if not all Unix platforms.
To make this work we have a special script in place that gets called instead of the usual spooling script. This places the file, which can be any format text file, into the appropriate directory. To help users identify their files we included their userid's in the filename. We also had a few problems with users sending large files there, taking up copious amounts of space. To overcome this we included in the script a check for files > 100Kb. These were compressed using Unix Zip which is able to be extracted by any of the windows zip utilities.

 

[gbell]

Thank you to all who have replied. I can see where a lot of thought has been given to these solutions.

Because of our network configuration, which allow third parties access to MIMS, none of the above would be suitable. We have an underlying requirement that the third parties do not access the network except via a firewall to MIMS.

Regards
Greg

 

[sdoughty]

Perhaps you need to write an application to pick files off the Unix file system and put them somewhere that your externals can get at them...if you are using Samba then a bit of VB or VBA would probably do the trick quite easily.

Cheers,

Steve