Archiving to professional storage system using Index files

Professional archiving software packages mostly work by pooling the content of a directory and add automatically the found files into its system. In order to give users later access to the files, the systems stores applicable additional information in a database.

As ELP is able to find any searchable data in the data stream, and stores it into variables, it is very easy to generate automatically fully freely designable index files. They have the same naming as the stored print / pdf / tiff file, but usually another extension. (HPS or XML)

The way to realize this is very basic and therefore also very powerful.

ELP does nearly not care about the file format and content of the index file. If you need XML, generate an XML file, if you need any other format, simply generate the prototype file and store it into the Workpath folder (Windows usually: c:\ProgramData\Welp, other systems: set by the -d command line argument).

Finally set in that prototype index file at the places where needed the names of the ELP collected variables.

The way ELP works is pretty simple:

• You need to archive an outgoing data stream with OutArchiveDir, InArchiveDir will NOT work!
   
• Process the print data stream as usually
• If needed collect additional variables out of the stream (StoreNextWordToVariable)
• Define in a rule the needed archiving keys
• Make sure you added your prototype index file to the definition: key ArchiveHPSFile=FileName or if not in the standard path ArchiveHPSFile=Path\FileName
• After the job is done, the index file is loaded, all variable placeholders are replaced by the variables found in the job and after this the file is stored using the same extension as the prototype file into the archive directory, the print job was stored to.

An example definition file DEMO.HPS can be found in the Workpath folder (e.g. c:\ProgramData\WELP). It can be edited with any ASCII Editor, like Notepad++.