What happened to Channel Skip

OL Connect Professional DataMapper
1

Planet Press Suite allowed a data emulation called Channel Skip. Is that no longer available in Planet Press Connect or is it defined using a different method?

Thanks!

2

Channel Skip was a special sort of line printer data. It’s not available in Datamapper per se, but it shouldn’t be a big issue to set it up in Datamapper by configuring document boundaries properly.

3

Yes - it is a special printing format. Sometimes it is also known as ASCII with ASA format. It contained printer control codes in the first column

It is easy enough to set the page breaks on the skip page code (1) but I do not see how it would allow for all of the other control codes. Skip i line, 2 lines, 3 lines, 4 lines skip to line ‘x’, etc. Planet Press Suite used all of these codes to normalize the data stream.

Thanks!

4

Channel Skip is not natively available in Connect because it is a very marginally-used format that would have added a fair amount of complexity to the DataMapper GUI.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to convert the Channel Skip file to a plain text file since the Channel Skip emulation is still available in the Workflow tool. You will then be able to process that file in the DataMapper as a plain text file.

You will need to create a new Workflow process that uses Channel Skip emulation with the proper parameters (load a sample data file to help you out). In that process:

  1. Start with a Folder Capture task
  2. Add an Emulated Splitter task to split on each data page,
  3. Add a Create File task that selects the entire content of the page (it will be a single page since you are splitting the file into so many emulated pages).
  4. Add a Send To Folder task to output that page to a new file, making sure to tick the Concatenate file option.

The entire process would look something like this:

5

Interesting workaround. I will give that a try.

Thanks!

6

for sure you need more or less complex JS scripting depending on how much channels are used.

Or converting the data in a preprocessor step to sort of line printer or csv data, however Channel Skip isn’t supported directly.