Change owner of Ebusiness Print Jobs

 

I'm going to have to create a post just to cover printers in the Ebusiness Suite as its an area that will always come up and most people try to avoid it like the plague, i know i did at the start.

I now feel very confident when it comes to looking at printers and setting up new ones but only after a LOT of practise and being tested by lots of scenarios.

In this situation the request was to change the owner of the print job which was sent from Oracle EBS to the print queue. The reason behind this was a new approach to printing, they needed to tie each print job to a unique user.

This was all on Linux using CUPS. Like anything sent from Oracle I didn't think it was possible to change the owner so the only hope was adding information to the print job somehow. We confirmed that you couldn't change the owner with Oracle in an SR.

Printing from Ebusiness is exactly like than printing from the OS (operating system) .
So the owner will be a unix/linux owner .

My intial searches took me to a lot of third party software companies looking after printing and they had articles asking their customers to add information to the PJL-Header information which they could then work with. The problem for me most of these were mostly aimed at SAP and there were solutions out there to handle this common risk.

I tried to get some help in the OTN forums and had a good dialogue going with one of the Guru's : https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=2517369

This led me to the system administrators guide for printers where i started concentrating on the print command strings.

The system administrator working with the printers initially couldn't use the changes we made to the string, but new what we were trying and suggested we tried using the -U parameter. Now i still cannot find this documented anywhere around the LP print command , maybe a Linux/Unix Guru can enlighten me, but this changed the owner of the print job inside the print job information even though it was coming from 'oracle'.

The solution then was to change the standard driver and we were in business.

OLD VALUE
lp -c -d$PROFILES$.PRINTER -n$PROFILES$.CONC_COPIES -t"$PROFILES$.TITLE" $PROFILES$.FILENAME



NEW VALUE
lp -c -d$PROFILES$.PRINTER -n$PROFILES$.CONC_COPIES -U$PROFILES$.ORIGUSERNAME -t"$PROFILES$.TITLE" $PROFILES$.FILENAME