Spooler Programmer's Guide

Introduction to the Spooler Subsystem

Spooler Programmer’s Guide—522287-002

1-9

Spooling From an Application Program

Spooling from an application program can be performed with the Guardian file-system

procedures or with the spooler interface procedures described in Section 2, Using the

Spooler Interface Procedures. These procedures give you complete control of the

contents and attributes of your job. You can find the procedure syntax for the spooler

and print procedures in Section 4, Spooler Procedure Calls. See the Guardian

Procedure Calls Reference Manual for the operating system procedure calls.

The spooler includes one or more collectors, described in Collectors on page 1-10.

Applications can direct their output to a particular collector by treating the collector as a

file (that is, an application can open a file to any collector and begin writing its output

by using the Guardian file-system WRITE[X] procedure). In this case, the collector

assigns default attributes to the job as shown in Table 1-2.

As an alternative method of spooling a job from a program, use the spooler interface

procedures, described in Section 2, Using the Spooler Interface Procedures. These

procedures provide an application process with the following abilities:



To specify job attributes (see SPOOLSTART Procedure on page 4-64)



To compress and block data and write it to the collection process (see

SPOOLWRITE Procedure on page 4-69)



To send CONTROL, CONTROLBUF, and SETMODE instructions to the collector

(see SPOOLCONTROL Procedure on page 4-24, SPOOLCONTROLBUF

Procedure on page 4-26, and SPOOLSETMODE Procedure on page 4-62)

Data Compression

All spooled data is compressed before being stored on disk. Data spooled with the

Guardian file-system procedures is compressed by the collector, while data spooled

with SPOOLWRITE is compressed before being written to the collector.

Nulls, zeros, and spaces are compressed on word by word basis. Each sequence of

consecutive words containing %0 (two nulls), %020040 (two spaces), or %030060 (two

Table 1-2. Default Attributes for Jobs

Attribute Default Value

Priority 4

Form name blanks

Copies 1

Hold flag Off

Hold after flag Off

Location #DEFAULT

Report name Owner’s group and username