| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
 |
|
IBM Advanced Function Presentation®(AFP®) is being utilized industry-wide to produce high-value, competitive documents.
AFP Toolbox makes it easy to produce these documents from within your business applications.
A Programmer's Tool
AFP Toolbox allows you to take full control over the power of the AFP data stream through a set of easy, high-function Application Programming Interfaces. It gives high-level languages, such as C, C++ and COBOL, access to advanced formatting functions in terms the application programmer can easily understand and use in existing applications. As a programmer's "tool," theAFP Toolbox will become indispensible when you are formatting complex, electronic output — output with variable text, "floating" electronic forms, dynamic image and graphics, or imbedded indexing.
Platform Independent Output
The MO:DCA® -P documents created by AFP Toolbox are platform independent and can be printed or viewed by the AFP print drivers on all supported platforms: System/390®, AS/400®, OS/2® and RS/6000®, and can be stored in IBM's OnDemand for AIX® archive library. The output of the AFP Toolbox can also be written to a file or returned to the application for further processing.
What does AFP Toolbox do?
AFP Toolbox lets you create print applications with complex, dynamic
formatting tailored to the business requirements of each page. For example, for customer statements it would be desirable to customize each statement. Each customer has different types and numbers of transactions. With preprinted form documents, it is "tone size fits all." With AFP Toolbox, each statement can be designed to exactly match each customer's data. The document can be further enhanced with the use of typographic fonts, graphics, images, bar coding or special messages. The result is a high-quality statement that is completely tailored to each customer, and projects a professional company image.
Why is the AFP Toolbox needed?
The design of most applications requiring a high degree of variability in formatted output is limited by the methods available to the programmer in developing the print output component. The external data-formatting capabilities provided by AFP page definitions and form definitions contain many new and rich capabilities, but the application is still tied to a static page format. For example, every page must contain room for 40 transaction items, regardless of the number of transactions for an individual customer.
Without AFP Toolbox, one way to create applications that can take advantage of the flexibility and power of AFP is to program the output in hexadecimal AFP-structured fields. While this is certainly still possible, and the structured fields are fully documented, the process requires the programmer to learn an entirely new technique that is basically foreign to most high-level language programmers.
With AFP Toolbox, a programmer coding in any language that supports calling a C or C++ interface can gain access to sophisticated AFP functions with superior ease of use in format ting printed output. These functions allow the programmer to specify and change such AFP formatting options as:
- The position and orientation of text
- Fonts used for printing lines and fields
- Rules and boxes with varying sizes and positions
- Color for rules, boxes or fonts
- Page segments, overlays, images and graphics
Indexing and Navigation of the AFP Data Stream
AFP Toolbox allows the programmer to add indexing tags to the output document. These tags can be used by the Windows AFP Viewer Plug-in to navigate through the document and locate specific pages or groups of pages, such as the statement for customer number "12345." The indexing tags can also be used by other applications, such as IBM's OnDemand for AIX archival and retrieval system to select and locate specific pages. The AFP Conversion and Indexing Facility (ACIF) can use these tags to create a separate index object file for more efficient processing by the Viewer or other applications.
A Helpful Tool As a complete development system, AFP Toolbox provides a familiar, high-function interface to the AFP print data stream, an interface that is consistent across many server platforms. Developers who are consolidating electronic print formatting in a common subsystem across many applications, and require multi-platform support, will find IBM AFP Toolbox a helpful tool.
|
Contact z/OS
Send us your questions and comments.
IBM trademarks are the property of IBM.
Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
|
|
|
