Slow tag printing through bartender

Hi!

I figured this would be a great place to see if anyone else has ran into a similar issue, we’re having an issue where any sort of tag (WIP, Finished goods, Raw Material labels) printing can vary in print time from 1 minutes to 45 minutes.

All of these prints happen through bartender

Just a few notes about our Kinetic/Printing setup

  • All label printing is done through bartender
  • There are some BPM’s in place for auto printing (Auto print upon save)
  • We only use the browser and not the smart client
  • We don’t have the edge agent deployed anywhere
  • Printing directly from the server from bartender prints almost instant
  • All other printer source - Print Preview > Print works fine
  • Prints from word, or excel or any windows program work as expected.

Assuming this is set up as an FTP / Azure file drop, have you cleaned out the old labels?
It tends to get slower to pick up the new files the more files there are.

Also, using the epicor supported auto print code runs everything through Task Agent, which adds inherent overhead. Coding a function that will write out the files directly increases the speed significantly.

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Hi Gabe,

You’re correct it is all setup as an FTP/Azure File drop but I havent considered clearing out the old label, would that affect my ability to use the reprint console?

Came to agree with @GabeFranco buildup of unprocessed label files in the listen folder is usually the culprit when we have slow label printing through bartender.

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I don’t use Reprint console (I made my own bartender function and built reprint buttons into the UI so the users can do it themselves) - but from my memory during testing, it keeps it’s own database with snapshots of printed label data and does not rely on the old files.

I usually write a scheduled function to cleanup files older than 30 days and run it every 30 days.

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I have Bartender move them, and then do the same.

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Checking our print folder there is 16,842 labels there :sweat_smile: so we might have found our answer. I’ll do some clean up and report back. Thanks folks!

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ohhhh, so THAT’s what that option in the BT Integration Builder is for… where’s that darn lightbulb emoji… :light_bulb:

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I don’t think it does affect the reprint console, because that data should be stored in the SQL server that bartender is running on, right?

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The example integration from Epicor explains setting the fail and success folders to keep the dump folder clean for that reason.

@utaylor is correct the system dB stores the information, but you need to configure it in the BT Admin tool.

If you are worried about files etc. And you are using some programmatic way to create the files the consider using a funtion and connect to the REST API for BT. There are posts on this topic.