Aloha: How to enable print spooling

[nineo]

Hi, I'm new to the forum, but its been a big help to me in the past. I'm hoping you guys can help me out once more.

I'm a software developer, and I have a requirement for an app that sends us the print jobs of a POS, which we do through the windows spooler.

However with Aloha, we've run into a problem: their printers are more often than not installed using the POS software's library of drivers, and do not go thru the windows print spooler which we've previously relied upon for POSes installed on a windows OS. We obviously don't want to get every one of our clients to install their printers as a windows printer and re-add them to Aloha.

So my two-part question is this: is it possible to configure Aloha 6.4/6.5/6.7 to save anything being printed to a file of our choice, so our app can grab them? And if so, what configuration/other files would need to be changed to make this possible? Documentation on this is really limited, and time is not something I have much of, so your expertise would be hugely appreciated!

 

[posrescue]

Best bet is probably the prt.log files that are written to with every print job. They are in the DATA directory in Aloha on the fileservet. Naming is prt(printer id number).log

 

[nineo]

I'll definitely check that out asap, thanks for the reply!

 

[dauphin2]

You have to use Viewprt52 to convert the print logs to a useable format. You can print to a Windows PDF printer as well. Aloha SDK goes over printer intercept, have you looked into that information already?

 

[nineo]

We've looked into Aloha Connect yes, but we're not trying to do a full integration here. All we want, basically, is the raw text in the print job, but we want to get it in whatever way is easiest for our customers. We can technically get them to remove all their printers from aloha, add them to windows, then add them back in aloha, and our app will work as it normally does.

What I'm wondering is if there's an easy way to get aloha's print jobs which aren't currently being done from a windows printer. The print logs sound promising, when our test store is closed we're going to take a look... but I'm unable to find any documentation on Viewprt52, are you able to elaborate further?

 

[dauphin2]

Viewprt52

 

[dauphin2]

Example: Viewprt52 PRT1.log>PRT1.txt

 

[nineo]

Thanks!

 

[nineo]

Thanks a lot guys! The print logs worked out beautifully for us, much appreciated. We go live in our test store tomorrow morning.

I do have one last question for you, if you'll indulge me: its nothing urgent but we are curious. We've noticed at our test store that the print logs only seem to store the last 5 or so print jobs: is this configurable or something that's hardcoded in aloha to limit runaway log file sizes?