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October 2011

The Robot Browser Interface has been enhanced for your viewing pleasure!

We recently enhanced the Robot Browser Interface, a free product to licensed users of our other Robot products, with some time-saving features.

Note: These enhancements are available in Robot Browser Interface R02M11.

The Robot Browser Interface is just that—a web browser interface to some of the Robot automation products from Help/Systems:

You can use the Robot Browser Interface to respond to statuses, view reports, send messages, and much more (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Use the Robot Browser Interface with your Robot products.

One big reason you use the Robot Browser Interface is to view reports from Robot/REPORTS. You can view either the most recent copy or archived versions of your reports. There are options for searching, printing, and downloading a report to a text file, and you can add, edit, and view report notes. With the Robot Browser Interface, you can view reports processed by Robot/REPORTS on any of your IBM i systems or partitions.

Enhancements that make your report viewing better

We’ve added the following enhancements to the Robot Browser Interface to improve your Robot/REPORTS experience.

Note: These enhancements are available in Robot Browser Interface R02M11.

You can:

  1. Create a PDF copy of the spooled file “on the fly” (see Figure 2).

    2. Figure 2: Use the Robot Browser Interface to save a report to a PDF file.

  2. View your reports with a “blue bar”, “green bar” or “gray bar” look, by specifying a view option. Now, the Robot Browser Interface will save your preferences.
  3. Save a user’s login password so they can access their reports with a click of a button. This is a great way for busy executives that don’t often sign on to the system to access their reports.
  4. Restore archived reports from the “index” view of a spooled file. Indexes are great if you have a need to access reports by invoice number, customer number, phone number, or some other easily identified value that is located consistently on a page.
  5. Sort by Report Set or Bundle Order. We keep the user preference for the order in which reports are listed.

If you’ve never used the Robot Browser Interface to access reports or other information from our products, take the time to download and install it from our website and discover what it can do for you.

It’s easy to install—you simply install a library on your IBM i server, and then install and configure the Portal Server software on a Windows, UNIX, Linux, or IBM i server. You can even install the Robot Browser server software on your desktop PC and point it at your IBM i server.

Give it a try!

Contributed by Chuck Losinski, Product Support Manager

Purchase any software solution from Help/Systems (Robot Automated Operations Solution); PowerTech (IBM i security solutions); SEQUEL Software (data access/analysis and productivity software); Bytware (anti-virus and monitoring solutions for IBM i) and enjoy big discounts on training, services, and IBM POWER7 systems. For details, contact your local IBM Business Partner, or visit our IBM i Solution Edition web page.

Q & A

Can I set up Robot/CONSOLE to monitor CPU usage for a specific job?

You can use Robot/CONSOLE resource monitoring to check how much CPU a job is using. To set up CPU monitoring, do the following:

  1. From the Robot/CONSOLE Explorer (the graphical interface), select Monitored Objects/Resource Monitors/Types.
  2. Right-click on Job Name and select New.
  3. Enter the job name to check, the priority (determines how often the resource is checked), and change the Expected Status to CPU.
  4. Set the Threshold to the CPU percentage threshold.

That’s it. Robot/CONSOLE checks the job at regular intervals and generates a message if the job’s CPU usage exceeds the threshold.

One of my users accidentally deleted a PDF file that was e-mailed to them by Robot/ALERT. Is there an easy way to resend it to them?

Yes, as long as the PDF file is still in the directory.

  1. From the Robot/ALERT Administration Menu, select option 5, History Menu.
  2. From the History Menu, select option 1, Display Message History.
  3. On the Display Message History panel, position the cursor at the user’s device and enter option 2, Change Status.
  4. From the window that displays, select the Resend option. Robot/ALERT will resend the e-mail with the PDF attachment.