Actinic and LOAD (Clan2000)

[Marci]

Wotcha folks... just wonderin if any of you have experience of using Actinic with the LOAD feature of City-Links' Clan2000 software for auto-generation of shipping labels...?

I've up'd a copy of the LOAD Guide onto my server if anyone's interested, which details how it works... basically a pipe-delimited txt file dumped into a directory that LOAD scans...

http://www.over-clock.com/marci/actinic/LOADGuide.pdf

[DBurrows]

I have the same system here, its something i am looking to try and acheive too although currently I am at a blank (however I havn't looked at it in the depth that i probably should!).

Will you keep me posted if you find a solution?

[Marci]

Well at the mo the prob is the requirement for a pipe rather than comma or tab (which actinic generates)... don't think it's gonna be do-able straight out of actinic... probably have to go actinic > excel or access > LOAD

[darranw]

I use a simple VB application to output the pipe delimited file.
The app prompts for an order number, then uses an ODBC connection to output the address lines to the text file.
The Clan2000 load program scans for the appearance of this file (about every 5 seconds) and automatically creates the label.

It works quite well. Let me know if you need more info.
We were forced to do this, because the Clan2000 software has a few quirks and we didn't like using it.

What I still can't do, is print labels for a future date (other than changing the clock on the PC)

[Marci]

Please do tell me more! We've been using Clan2000 for ages now, but I've literally only just stumbled on the LOAD feature this week...

[darranw]

What info do you need? The file format is relatively simple as laid out in the Clan documentation.
The real advantage of using "Load" is that we are not re-keying the data into Clan.
I can try sending you my VB executable if you want? Not sure it will work without sending you all the vb runtime components.

[Marci]

I'll likely have most of the VB Runtimes anyway, so yeah, if you could mail it over to marci@over-clock.com that'd be tops fella!