Sorry,
  I had to jump in & ask the obvious...of course, it may have been suggested
already, but email has been goofy today....

 Any chance of simply intercepting the spoolfile with your own file equation
with ;dev=disc?   I.e. BEFORE it becomes a spool file.

 If the program issues it's own file equation, you may be out of luck
(without some "fun" intercepting the COMMAND intrinsic ;-) ), but if it's
coming from a UDC or JCL, you should be able to override it.

RAT
_______________________________________________________________________
 Rich Trapp "RAT"
 Managed Business Solutions   [log in to unmask]   http://www.mbsnav.com
 Assigned to Design Automation Support at Agilent Technologies
 Telnet or 970-679-2221   [log in to unmask]     Loveland, CO USA

_______________________________________________________________________


-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2000 11:48 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Converting a spool file into Flat Ascii


On Tue, 13 Jun 2000 10:50:26 -0600, Wendell E Gragg
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>I need to get some data from our patron database into a flat file. The
>only tool I have to do this is the report writer that is bundled with our
>library automation software and it will only print to a spool file.  Is
>there anyway to take a spool file and convert it into a straight ascii
>file so that we can then transfer it off of the HP and manipulate it?  We
>have no programming languages or utilities besides the basic utilities
>that come with MPE.
>
>Thanks in advance for the help.
>
>Wendell
>
>Wendell E. Gragg                 Socorro Independent School District
>HP Library Systems Specialist    El Paso Tx
>[log in to unmask]
>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>^ Liberal:  One who believes that there was no art before federal funding^
>^                                                                        ^
><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

You may want to fcopy from spoolfile from the "O{dfid}.OUT.HPSPOOL" into a
fixed-record format file before downloading it.  Here is a command file I
use to do this all the time:

PARM DFID,FILE="SPOOL"
SETVAR HPMSGFENCE 2
PURGE !FILE
BUILD !FILE;REC=-133,,F,ASCII;DISC=9999999
SETVAR HPMSGFENCE 0
RUN CI.PUB.SYS;PARM=3;STDIN=Y.PUB.SYS;&
       INFO="FCOPY FROM=O!DFID.OUT.HPSPOOL;TO=!FILE"


(The file "Y.PUB.SYS" has one record in it with a "Y"....it answers the
prompt for
*200*WARNING: FROMFILE RECSIZE IS 1008 BYTES, TOFILE RECSIZE IS 133 BYTES.
CONTINUE OPERATION (Y OR N) ?

The spoolfile/report will end up in the file designated by "!FILE".  Then
the file can be downloaded and processed easily.

Randy Keefer, Consultant