MAPPING Suite and Navision
MAPPING Suite: Printing Solutions For All ERPs
Retrieving print files coming from Navision
To retrieve print files coming from Navision, we use a specific printer driver that converts EMF stream into TXT stream. TXT files will be created on the Mapping production server. Using a printer driver makes the actions fully transparent to the users in that they press the usual Print button under Navision to print their documents.
Designing the layout in MAPDRAW
Once the files are converted to TXT, the next step is to design the layout. To do that, you first need to design the overlay that contains static objects such as tables and logos and then the variable part of the template that includes the actual document data such as product lines or the amount of an invoice for example. The variable part is made up of objects such as zones and groups. Zones are used to retrieve values from a spool file. Because the values are variable, zones pick out the data position within the file, i.e. line and column number and number of characters. On the other hand, groups are used to automate the execution of an object (zone, line, group, logo...) on several consecutive lines: address, product lines, operations... A group on its own doesn't print anything but allows processing the same object several times while creating it only once.
Production Mode
To handle Navision print files, we need to retrieve the TXT files once they are converted. To do this we use the "MAPPING Robot" to scan various directories. Once a file is created, the Robot uses the rules engine to apply the matching layout and then sends it to the spooler.
