Each program FETCHed will perform a WRITE USING FORM. Once the program has completed, users are able to print the 3 forms in Internet Explorer. When they do this, each form does not start on a new page (even though NEWPAGE has been used before each form is printed) and there seems to be a lot of extra space (or pages in some cases) printed between each form, more than what the Map has been defined with.
We are using a new internet program that basically connects to our mainframe and regenerates our online screen via the web. This is how users are able to print from IE. If users access this process via the Mainframe, the forms are sent directly to their local printer and are printed as expected.
I want to know if there is any other programming that can be done in Natural to help format the print output of these forms.
Is your “new internet program” a screen scraper then? That is, the WRITE USING FORMs are directed to the screen and the screen scraper copies the results to the web page?
IE doesn’t have the same definition of “pages” for printing that the mainframe does. Without knowing your screen scraper, its hard to tell where the mismatch is. For example, the screen scraper may be injecting additional blank lines to try to line up a form page with a printable web page. Examination of the generated HTML might give some clues - perhaps there are configuration options in the screen scraper to help.
It is called JACADA. I am not sure if this is a “screen scraper” or not. After the program has completed, users in JACADA can click on a link that takes them to another web page which we call “Available Print Jobs”. This page looks like it contains any transactions that would normally go directly to their local printer had they been accessing the system through the mainframe and not through the web.
In Jacada, I went to the mainframe online screen that I wanted to generate the 3 forms from. Once I completed it, I went to the “Available Print Jobs” page and in there was a link that opens a separate html page containing the 3 forms (almost as if it were on large document). at this point I just click on the IE print and that it is. The html is very very basic and contains . it almost seems as though JACADA or IE does not recognize the NEWPAGE statements.
The JACADA developing is outsourced, and they have indicated that it is not their software that is alternating the layout. They said “a workaround would be to remove the blank spaces on the host itself. When we print from the host there is not too much of a difference in terms of blank spaces between reports, but the only thing is each report starts from a new page while through printing from Jacada, reports do get printed in the middle of a page if the previous report had a lot of blank spaces left”.
It is possible that these forms are generating extra blank spaces if there is no data to display, but I am having a difficult time determining if that is really the case. I thought that these MAPS were supposed to compress blank lines…