Delimiting Print Jobs

Many print jobs can be sent over a single PC/3270 printer session. PC/3270 allows multiple sessions and applications to share a single workstation printer on a between-jobs basis. PC/3270 needs to know when each print job starts and ends so that printers can be shared properly and begin and end job strings can be sent at the appropriate times. The emulator recognizes a number of different methods of delimiting print jobs:

By Session

PC/3270 printer support assumes, by default, that all print jobs are delimited by sessions. That is, in the absence of all other indicators, PC/3270 assumes that a print job begins when a printer session is started and ends when it is reset.

Time-Out Interval

On DFT sessions, print jobs can be delimited by a user-specified timeout interval. A print job on a DFT printer session begins when the first host-outbound data for that job is received, and ends when no host-outbound data is received for a period of time exceeding the user-specified DFT timeout interval. For PC/3270, this interval is specified during configuration.

Structured Fields

The host can use structured fields to indicate to the device that a new file is beginning or that the current file is completed. PC/3270 delimits print jobs with Begin of File and End of File structured fields (SF) to perform host-directed printing. Structured fields are described in Structured Fields.