Process Software - PMDF Technical Notes

WPS+ to ASCII Conversion For ALL-IN-1 Users on an OpenVMS Alpha System

Problem description

Are there any WPS+ to Text conversion capabilities available on Alpha that we can use?

Clues to solving the problem

This is a "how can I ..." issue rather than a "what should I need to do ..." issue.

Solution

There are two approaches to the this question. Arguably the "most correct" mechanism would be for the User Agent (ALL-IN-1 in this case) to do the conversion before handing the message to the transport. ALL-IN-1 has the ability to do this, but that is a question to ask DEC. However, here is some information on the subject taken from the ALL-IN-1 Mail Management Guide documentation (section 5.4) for ALL-IN-1 version 3.1 (copyright June 1994):

"A non-Digital mail system that does not recognize WPS-PLUS encoding, WPS-PLUS messages are not translated. To translate the messages into ASCII, you must set the logical name OA$MTI_TRNS to 1 or 2:

"Setting OA$MTI_TRNS to 1 translates all attachments of type MAIL, for example, the main message, replies and cover notes. It will not translate other types of attachments, such as documents created in and sent from the Word and Document Processing menu.

"Setting OA$MTI_TRNS to 2 will translate the main message and all types of outgoing attachments that are supported in ALL-IN-1.

"If OA$MTI_TRNS is zero, users must use either the EDT or WPS editor (but not WPS-PLUS) to write messages destined for mail systems that do not recognize WPS-PLUS encoding.

"The setting of OA$MTI_TRNS does not affect local message delivery."

The OA$MTI_TRNS logical is defined as follows:

$ DEFINE/SYSTEM/EXEC  OA$MTI_TRNS value

The OA$MTI_TRNS logical corresponds to the setting of the Translate or ASCII Translate field (depending on the version of ALL-IN-1) which can be set by going into ALL-IN-1 as MANAGER, typing A1CONFIG, and then A1BASE. You have to stop and restart ALL-IN-1 to get such changes to take effect. If ALL-IN-1 is in use then the sender and fetcher need to be stopped and restarted.

Using a document convertor

The second approach, would be to use any converter that knows how to handle WPS+. One such converter is KEYpak from ANE Resources, Inc. -- it runs on a number of different platforms including Open VMS and Tru64 Unix.

Once you have a converter, you will need to set up appropriate PMDF mappings and conversion entries. Presuming you have a message coming from Message Router into PMDF via the MR_LOCAL channel going out the TCP_LOCAL channel, here are sample mappings and conversions entries. If you do not have a PMDF_TABLE:MAPPINGS. or a PMDF_TABLE:CONVERSIONS. file, you will need to create them. Make sure that they are world-readable.

In your PMDF_TABLE:MAPPINGS. file, you would have an entry as follows:

CONVERSION



  IN-CHAN=mr_local;OUT-CHAN=TCP_LOCAL;CONVERT		Yes

Note the format of the above entry: The title is flush left followed by a blank line; the entry is indented one or more spaces from the left margin. If there are two or more entries, a blank line must separate each entry.

Next, in your PMDF_TABLE:CONVERSIONS. file, you would have an entry as follows:


out-channel=tcp_local; in-type=application; in-subtype=wpsplus;
  out-type=text; out-subtype=plain; out-mode=text;
  command="@sys$manager:your_command_procedure 'input_file' 'output_file'"

Where "your_command_procedure" is the command procedure for using the specific conversion utility.

Note the format of the above conversion entry: The first line starts flush left while the second and subsequent lines are indented one or more spaces from the left margin.

If you have a compiled configuration (that is, if you see files when you do a dir of pmdf_config_data), be sure to recompile and reinstall.