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In this video I'm going to show you what a workstation customizing object is and how
you can create one to change the output of your printer. Many of the problems of people
call in on to the printer group are solved through the use of workstation customizing
object, so I wanted to take just a few minutes to talk about what that means and what a workstation
customizing object is.
When you print to a printer from Windows you use a printer driver. Now, you can't install
a Windows printer driver on to the iSeries. But what we do is we ship printer drivers
already on the system, and they're called workstation customizing objects. But we kind
of hide them from users until they really need to use them later. When you configure
an ASCII printer on the system you have to fill in a MFRTYPMDL. A perfect example is
*HP4. Now, *HP4 is not the name of an object in the system, because no object on the system
starts with a *.
*HP4 is actually a pointer to another object on the system called QWPHPLSR4. And this is
a customizing object in library QSYS. Now, if you call and you have a question like you
want something to print in larger font, or you wanted to print in portrait, or its printing
portrait and you want it to be landscape, or you wanted to have a larger margins or
something like that, we will often tell you that you need to create a workstation customizing
object. In order to do this we have specific documentation.
Usually it tells you something like the following: Retrieve the existing MFRYTPMDL. For this
use the RTVWSCST command. Then specify *TRANSFORM, give it the MFRTYPMDL that you are using,
specify a source member (that's usually the same thing except there's no *) and then you
put it in library QGPL. Then you need to work with a QTXTSRC member, and then you'll see
the customizing object You might see one or in our case we've retrieved quite a few of
them. When you display the retrieved workstation customizing object source, it's really just
a series of filters. This one creates PCL5 as you can see here, and based on the spooled
file attributes and the contents of the school file, we will generate a particular pcl data
stream. If the spooled file says it should be printed landscape we'll use this particular
hex command to send down an ASCII PJL command that means landscape. If your spoooled file
says DRAWER(2) we'll send down this command here to send down a PCL drawer command. And
so the whole customizing object is filled with these kinds of values. Our customizing
object documentation (of which we have a multitude) gives you specific instructions about what
to do with all of these kinds of things depending on what situation you're in. Once you've made
the changes--in this case I'll just say I'll switch the drawers. I'll go in here to edit
it and I'll make drawer one the same thing as drawer two. So that will force things out
of drawer two, for example. Than press Enter and press F3 to save the changes and hit Enter.
Now I've saved the member, and now I need to create a customizing object. For that I
use the CRTWSCST command, and I'll specify a new name. Maybe I'd want to call it something
like DRAWER2, and I'll put it library QGPL. I specify the name of my source member (SRCMBR)
which in my case was HP4, and then I'll have to give it the name of my source file and
my library. Once I do that my customizing object is created. So now I've changed the
shipped driver and have created a new driver called DRAWER2. And I would simply change
my device description to us that new workstation customizing object.
So that's all a workstation customizing object is-- it's a printer driver. And our instructions
for customizing objects are telling you how to modify that driver so that your printer
will do what you want. If you have any questions on this you can read our customizing object
documents, or you can leave a comment on this video, or give us a call.