Production Print ES

Question

I am using watcehd folder mechanism for stream serv on windows.
Description of Workflow
1) Production Print will take 3 different file types as input. These types are the following:
1.1) A PDF that is the primary content of the print job
1.2) A XML file that contains all the recipient addresses and printer configuration details
1.3) A XDP that will generate a PDF configured with the recipients' mailing address from the XML file in 1.2 (Similar to a cover letter)
2) Business rules:
2.1) Production Print must create a new PDF using the XML and XDP which will have a recipient address in the top left corner.
2.2) If there are X number of recipients then Production Print should create X PDFs with 1 recipient per PDF.
2.3) Each generated PDF must append the PDF from 1.1
2.4) Each combined PDF from 2.3 should be printed.
2.5) According to a specific parameter in the XML, there are cases where only 1 copy of the generated PDF should be printed in contrast to 2.2
Please help me on various steps invloved for developing the above work flow.

Answer 1

Here's one approach:
A. Read the PDF (1.1) using PDFIN and store it in the post processor repository.
B. Read the XML (1.2) and merge it with the XDP (1.3) (one per recient according to 2.2)
C. Store the result of B in the post processor repository. Create metadata regarding recipient and number of generate a ppq (post processor query)
D. Read the ppq and merge the result of A and C (once per recipient)
E Format the result of D in an appropriate printer language and print.
F 2.5 can be implemented using a script in C.
The trick is as you can see to use the post processor repository to merge the content of the PDF (read once) with the output of the XML/XDP merge (several) asynchronously. This is a pretty common scenario for LCPP.
Hope this helps.
Stefan Cohen
-Product Manager, StreamServe