MAPPING Suite and Gold (GoldStock, GoldCentral)

MAPPING Suite: Printing Solutions For All ERPs

Several steps are necessary to create documents from Gold:

  • Retrieving data.
  • Creating a Gold document from MAPREPORT.
  • Designing the layout with MAPDRAW.
  • Production Mode.

Mapping Gold

Retrieving data

There are different ways of handling data, two of which are particularly interesting:

  • Interfacing MAPPING with Gold's Oracle database.
  • Extracting data from Gold (in XML or CSV format, etc.).

In the first case, you will need to create the queries required to build the document or base template in MAPREPORT. Working with the database directly means that printing can be triggered either in batch mode or by the user via the menu generator.

In the second scenario, it may be necessary to edit the data extraction programs to fit your needs. But in any case, the way printing is triggered is completely transparent when the data is extracted from the Gold interface.

Once the data is collected, you can start designing the "spool" file.

Creating a Gold document with MAPREPORT

The first step in creating a MAPREPORT document is to build the tables that will contain the data by entering the SQL queries and defining the field names and types.

Mapreport Gold

Then, we need to lay out the different blocks that make up the document. It is usually recommended to fill in the first ten columns with conditional codes that can be used to simplify the construction of the template.

Mapreport Gold

Once the blocks are set up, the document takes shape and all there is to do is add the calculations and specify how the page breaks occur, either basic page breaks or more advanced page breaks depending on the degree of sophistication of the report template.

Example report created from a Gold database

Mapreport Gold

Creating a document template with MAPDRAW

MAPDRAW document templates are created in two easy steps:

  • First, we need to design the overlay containing the static objects such as tables, logos or text.
  • Then, the layout i.e. the data mapping part where we retrieve the spool file's variable data such as product lines or invoice amount for example.

Mapdraw Gold

Production Mode

To print a Gold document, there are several options:

  • We can let the user generate the print file via a personalized menu created in MAPREPORT. The menu can contain  variables initialized by an SQL command, a shell or specific values.

Below is an example menu where the user can select and print an invoice, the list of invoice numbers being determined by an SQL query. Once all the settings are selected, a script executes a combination of different actions that lead to the final result i.e. generating the report + reformatting + sending the file to the spooler.

spooler

  • Alternatively, we can use the rules engine.

In that case, the data sent from Gold is retrieved in a spooler outqueue associated with the rules engine. The queue is commonly known as a MAPPING entry point.

moteur de règle

Once the file is detected, and if the condition associated with the process returns true, the rules engine will execute an action that runs the report and then remaps the resulting file.

moteur de règle