Job-Sheet-Content attribute
Problem Statement
Today the model document allows the end user to select whether or not a
job sheet should be printed, but there is no mechanism for a user to
specify what should be printed on the job sheet. In many cases, an
administrator will establish the content of the job sheet, using
information that comes from the print job request itself, such as
job-name, or job-originating-user. However, these values are somewhat
limited, and an administrator may want to use other information not
available as a standard job attribute.
Suggested Solution
Using the proposed dictionary attribute (Hastings-deBry proposal),
provide a means for the administrator to collect additional job-sheet
information. This could incidentally be used for other purposes, such
as accounting. This would be done with a new job template attributes
called "Job-Sheet-Content".
To help the client, each field to be printed on the job sheet is
represented by a pair of attributes:
1. The first attribute in the pair is of the form "prompt-n",
where n is a digit starting with 1.
2. The second attribute is of the form "prompt-n-response".
This attribute provides a means for an administrator to collect
additional user information to be printed on a job sheet. There
is no standard set of semantics associated with the text data
supplied by the administrator or the end user. Text is assumed to
be in the language of the end-user.
ISSUE: How does one associate the end-user's language with a set
of text dictionary attributes? In a multi-lingual configuration,
it must be possible for the server to select the dictionary entries
based on the end user's language.
For example, an administrator defines the job-sheet-content attribute
as the following text attributes:
"Prompt-1" = 'Last Name'
"Prompt-1-response" = ' '
"Prompt-2" = 'Department'
"Prompt-2-response" = ' '
"Prompt-3" = 'Building'
"Prompt-3-response" = ' '
In this example, the default values for the prompt-n-response attributes
were set to a strings of ASCII blanks. They could have been any text
string, perhaps a default name, or a string saying "enter text here".
A client application, getting the job-sheet-content-supported attribute,
would receive the above dictionary. Since there is no semantic associated
with the actual text data, the client simply puts up the prompt and
collects the response from the end-user in the associated response field.
These fields are passed back to the IPP Printer with the print request
where the data input by the end user is printed on the job-sheet in a
format defined by the administrator.
Roger K deBry
Senior Technical Staff Member
Architecture and Technology
IBM Printing Systems
email: rdebry@us.ibm.com
phone: 1-303-924-4080