Edge Agent printing jobs from print routing Break in wrong order (sporadically)

Kinetic ERP
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We use an APR rule on our JobTrav report to break job travelers on assembly, and then based on the part number, set an appropriate Report Style (different layouts for different drawing sizes, A,B,C,D). The individual assemblies are ultimately printed in their correct page size in order from our release printer; this has worked well for years in the smart client.

Our Production Control staff have been moved to Kinetic in browser with the Edge Agent and began noticing that traveler assemblies are now being sporadically printed slightly out of order, with assemblies swapping positions with others. This requires more work from our production control staff to correct document orders after they’re printed.

My theory: The SSRS server (or whatever is ultimately responsible for sending print jobs to the Edge Agent) is sending the assembly reports as they’re rendered, but due to various reasons may not be reaching the Edge Agent in the generated order (file size, network conditions, etc). The Edge Agent is then printing them as received, even if out of order.

Has anyone had issues with this? We use a special print driver called Print&Share that offers a lot of control over how print jobs are printed, so I’m looking into using its sorting features to recognize the assembly number and re-combine received print jobs in the correct order before printing, but this is a work in progress. It’s also frustrating that I need to upset something that’s been working well for so long because of the Edge Agent.

Thoughts?

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I suspect you’re correct in your theory of what’s occurring. We have not had this as we don’t have any APRs that break a report in this manner.

I’d put in a ticket and try to get a PRB created.

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When homepage receives reports it sends their IDs to the Edge Agent. This goes in the order of reports in the table.

Then Edge Agent gets the report bytes for each report from server and prints them. Probably those bytes are downloaded with different speed based on the size of each report. and then they are printed as soon as they are downloaded.

To change it the homepage should send print request to the edge agent and wait for the printer to print it before sending the next request. More complex logic than now.

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Also less performant I imagine. Perhaps a timestamp based approach? Are there any method directive/data directive approaches I could leverage to control printing of each report until a previous one has completed?

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the messages are processed independently inside EA. So one thread does not know anything about other reports

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An update: I heard back from Epicor and they acknowledged this behavioral change from the Smart Client. They said that they will review further as a potential regression or enhancement opportunity.

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