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Operational Reporting

This page covers aspects and considerations regarding the installation of Report Formatters and Print Agents used to format and print operational reports that use Report Designer layouts. Towards the end of this section, there is also a shorter section covering some important multi-site aspects. The Report Formatter is the server side process responsible processing/formatting print jobs using Report Designer layouts. Technically a Report Formatter is a background job in IFS Connect. This means it's a multi-threaded component executing inside a J2EE container, IFS Extended Server. The Print Agents handles the specific task of printing the reports formatted by the Report Formatter. This is a stand-alone component deployed on the same, or on a separate server, as the Report Formatter. Both the Report Formatter and the Print Agent can be set up in several instances for one single environment.

This page describes important considerations necessary to take into account when setting up such an environment. We'll deal with load balancing, redundancy, fail-over, printing to remote printers over WAN, increasing the formatting/rendering capacity (ability to process print jobs and create PDF documents by adding hardware) and so on.

Unicode Considerations

For the Report Formatter and Print Agent there aren't really any Unicode considerations, it's fully Unicode compatible. One needs to set up several Report Formatters in order for dates and numbers to get formatted correctly depending on the locale and the font used.  The layouts need to contain the glyphs/characters used but otherwise there's nothing strange about running this in a Unicode environment.

For an overview as well as some in-depth information about the different concepts and components referred to on this page, please have a look at the following links.