Livecode???? and .SPL files

[tal_is_back]

It is for a boat travel company :

Their accounting is on excel, so the person in charge has to take all paper tickets (material ticket not immaterial) and to fill an excel file for the day.
So i wanted to automate that, instead of taking each paper and writing sometime more than 100 tickets informations on excel.

Example of an accouting :

Ticket number / traveler price / taxs / vehicle price / taxs / total price

2256554 / 120 / 70 / 360 / 80 / 630



The web site editing the ticket is made by a private company, so i have not the hand on that.

The men who sell the tickets to customers, fill the informations on the web site (name, destination...), and click ----> a .asp page is edited ( price, taxs, ticket number) ----> this ticket is printed

I wanna save the final informations automaticly, but it is not so easy.... the mailing technic is a good idea but unfortunately many customers dont give their mail address.

[Mark]

Hi,

OK, it is getting a bit more clear now.

That ticketing company is working for the boating company, I presume. Ask the ticketing company if they can send an e-mail of every order automatically, or ask them to provide a solution that contacts a database on your own company's server to write the data of each order to that database (I do this with PayPal for example). (E-mail would not be send from or to customers' addresses but only from the ticketing company to the boat travel company).

It might be possible --but not easy-- to write a browser extension or even a custom LiveCode-based browser, which modifies the HTML code of the ASP file. Such an extension or custom browser could add a JavaScript to gather and send the relevant data and then print the page.

Kind regards,

Mark

[tal_is_back]

yes it could be very easier if the ticketing company send the data they store, it would be the ultimate solution if i dont find another.
But there is also the wish to be more independant and not work with the ticketing company lol

The browser solution is a solution which could work i think, but difficult to implement.

Pitty that i can not do anything with this .SPL files, but if they are stored they are usefull for something i think.

I have made some tests with this files, when i configure the printer to store them, i can print them again all time i want, but only printing it.
if it can print it again, it must be a solution to extract that datas.. or not.. lol

[tal_is_back]

I was searching again, i have find lynx extension :

First make a test directory:

mkdir lynx_testing

Navigate into that directory:

cd ./lynx_testing

Start the crawl. Don't do this on other people's large web sites because it could use up a lot of bandwidth on a large site.

You will then end up with a directory full of text files with a .dat file extension.

Tip:You can change the .dat file extensions to .txt with the following command — make sure you are in the right directory first:

rename -v 's/\.dat$/\.txt/' *.dat

Or remove the file extensions altogether with the following command:

rename -v 's/\.dat$//' *.dat

More about the rename command here

Assuming that you are leaving the .dat file extensions for now, this is a list of files and what they contain:

traverse.dat — This file contains a list of URLs that were spidered.
traverse2.dat — This file contains a list of URLs, including the HTML <title>. They are listed in the order encountered.
lnk00000###.dat — Each extracted web page will be saved in a numbered file with the HTML titles and URLs at the top. Lynx is a text browser so these files will only contain text content from the web pages The HTML will be stripped out. I've had trouble opening these files from Nautilus, but you can easily open them in the terminal with commands like gedit lnk00000001.dat or vim lnk00000001.dat.
Tip: There is more information on the files created with -traversal here
If you want to combine all the pages of text into one file for searching with a visual text editor like gedit, SciTE, or Notepad, you can use the cat command like this:

cat * >MyFile.txt

That will create a file called MyFile.txt that contains all of the text from the files in the current directory.

You can also grep (search) the files all at once with the grep command. Navigate to the directory with the files that you want to search and type something like:

grep -i "your search terms" *

The -i will make it a case-insensitive search. For more information on grep, type man grep in the terminal.

GNU Wget


I dont know if it talks to some of you...

Good night all, see you

[sturgis]

Can you print a dummy ticket and attach its' spl file? Or put it in a dropbox and provide a link?

Also you might look at this page.. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/105 ... ile-Viewer

[tal_is_back]

Hi,

here is the file (it is what contains the folder spool/printers after printing one .asp file) :

u/63992719/00006.spl

I put only the end of link cause ("Your account does not have permission to post links or domain/page references.")

I think it is possible to write an extension which will save .asp files automaticly in a browser ( cause i have seen similar extensions) but for the moment i have not the ability to do this

Thanks

[tal_is_back]

I am reading you link, they say : In addition, knowing the structure of the spool file means that it is possible to parse the file to extract information from it. You might want to extract just the text from a printed document for archival purposes, and you can do this by parsing the file and extracting the EMR_EXTTEXTOUTA and EMR_EXTTEXTOUTW records.

It seems to be possible to parse and extract data from .SPL files, we are getting closer, thank you.

[tal_is_back]

I have tried yor software with two files :

The first file is made with pdf creator
if you open the file with notepad, you can see on the top

< f a x . t x t   - B l o c - n o t e s „ Ø O ]
R t EMF £ l ^ h Ò )

It works with that kind of file.

The second SPL file( the .asp ticket printed) has this on the top :

ZIMFÍš©Ü Íš©ÜŠ ( Š Ò ®t i c k e t . a s p . p d f $ ®H P L a s e r J e t P 2 0 3 5 ªH P L a s e r J e t P 2 0 3 5

It doesnt work with that kind of file.

I can not test it now, but we can configure the processor of the printer, choosing RAW, EMF or text.... I think it was configure on RAW when i printed.

Thanks,

[Mark]

Hi,

ZIMF is too specific, but for EMF you might find converters. If you can use EMF instead of ZIMF then you should be able to do what you want.

Kind regards,

Mark

[sturgis]

Can you email me the dummy file? bonnmike at gmail dot com? Not sure I can dig into it well enough to figure things out, bit then I could post it to my dropbox so others could give it a shot. (make sure its a dummy ticket with no customer info pls)

Hi,

here is the file (it is what contains the folder spool/printers after printing one .asp file) :

u/63992719/00006.spl

I put only the end of link cause ("Your account does not have permission to post links or domain/page references.")

I think it is possible to write an extension which will save .asp files automaticly in a browser ( cause i have seen similar extensions) but for the moment i have not the ability to do this

Thanks

[sturgis]

Its definitely too far over my head to understand the spl file in question. If anyone else wants to take a look at it, look at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11957935/00006.spl

[Mark]

Sturgis,

That's a ZIMF too and it is too specific, as I wrote earlier. Probably, EMF files will be easier to handle.

Kind regards,

Mark

[tal_is_back]

Hi,

I dont knw if it is the printer configuration which make zimf file, or the .asp file which generate automaticly zimf file, ill look tomorrow.

Now i am searhing if it exists backup software, which sauve automaticly web pages.

tal

[Mark]

Tal,

If you had used the past few days to write your own browser, you would have had a solution already (or at least a prototype).

Best,

Mark

[sturgis]

DOH. Yep, this is a great idea.

Tal,

If you had used the past few days to write your own browser, you would have had a solution already (or at least a prototype).

Best,

Mark