Pre Selecting pages to print before compose

[Jamie Powers]

I have a vdp job that has 3 pages to select from and at compose time each record looks at each page then selects the correct pageto print,so essentially the compose process goes through 1000 records x 4 pages and then prints 1 of the optional pages. This process is very slow.

 

Is there a way to make the page selection process happen at the beginning of the job and then follow the vdp rules to pull the correct assets?

[esmith]

I'm not sure I understand how you are accomplishing this now? If you're doing what I think you're trying to do, I would use the "Page Usage..." dialog to set the optional pages to 'unused', assign each a name, and create an OnRecordStart rule that would set the appropriate optional page to 'used' per information in the data file. I suppose it takes longer to do this than to just compose a job with no optional pages, but not that long, especially for just 1000 records...

[Jamie Powers]

I did have all of the pages set to use. I tried the process that you mentioned and each record is looking at all of the pages and then selecting the proper page. This is a very slow process and I have other jobs that require upto 45 different pages to be setup. The shell is different on each page. So, if every record has to look at every page to determine which page to use and then follow the other rules within the job these jobs could take upto 12 seconds per record.

 

Onrecord Code:

 

FusionPro.Composition.SetBodyPageUsage("REG 1", Field("CR Code") == "Reg1");

FusionPro.Composition.SetBodyPageUsage("AFT 1", Field("CR Code") == "Aft1");

FusionPro.Composition.SetBodyPageUsage("BEC", Left(Field("CR Code"),3) == "Bec");

FusionPro.Composition.SetBodyPageUsage("Version", (Field("Banner") == "Banner") && Field("10_Envelope Shell") != "10_Envelope Shell");

[Dan Korn]

How much do the different "shell" pages differ from one another?

 

Are they just different backgrounds with the same variable data frames on them? If so, you could simply use a blank PDF page with a Graphic frame on the lowest layer and assign it to a Graphic rule which selects the proper background image.

 

If the layout (positions) of the variable changes based on the shell, then you're getting a bit beyond the capabilities of FusionPro Desktop. You may want to look into using FP Server instead.