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FFMERGE and Fax-on-Demand |
  
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FFMERGE and Fax-on-Demand |
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FFMERGE can be used in the automatic production of fax-on-demand documents for your CopiaFacts system. Many CopiaFacts users regularly update their document base from a Windows application, and FFMERGE allows you to automate this process.
All that is needed is for the infobox file reference to be placed on the FFMERGE action line on the first page of your document. If you are using a report generator such as Microsoft Access or Crystal Reports, you will need to specify that the first line of your document header is in 12-point FFMERGE font and contains the infobox reference you will use for this document.
The reference must be preceded by "fn=" to indicate to FFMERGE that it is a filename, not a fax telephone number. No FS file will be produced by FFMERGE.
For example:
When this document is 'printed' to FFMERGE, the pages will be placed in the image directory with the infobox number 1234. The filename created will be 00001234.TIF. Note that an existing file with this name will be silently replaced.
If you are using FFMERGE to automate the updating of your CopiaFacts infoboxes, you must address the problem of updating an active document. Many CopiaFacts systems which update documents regularly can schedule updating overnight, but some applications take calls over all 24 hours of the day, or require documents to be updated every few minutes; in this case you must prevent FFMERGE from writing a new document file while CopiaFacts is trying to transmit it to a caller.
The simplest method is to use the CopiaFacts $infobox lookup feature to select from a circular list of document numbers. If a caller enters 1234, you could arrange for an NDX/DBF file accessed by this command to return whichever of documents 12341, 12342, 12343 and 12344 was the latest completed version output from FFMERGE. As soon as your external application has written a new version of the document, it should update the data file to reference this document. Calls already in progress can then continue sending an earlier version of the document without interruption.
Topic url: http://www.copia.com/support/refmanual/index.html?ffmergeandfax_on_demand.htm