E-Business Suite

There might be some caveats because you did not specify what version of Documaker you are using. The initialization of DAL functionality is sufficient in later versions - say 12.5 on - but it is possible this might not work in some really old versions.

In your INI, under the TRN_FIELDS group, comment out the RUNDATE definition by placing a semicolon at the start. (This way you will be able to reverse it if this doesn't work.)

Next, look for - or add - the GenTrnDummyFields group.

This group is used to pre-initialize any GVM variables that you want set at the transaction level, but not necessarily coming from the extract. You see in this example, mine is setting the variables ONE, TWO, and now RUNDATE.

The definition expects to have a constant definition, but through the wizardry of INI built-in functions, you can call a DAL script that actually returns the value. The ~DalRun is a built-in that executes the named script that follows. Whatever that script returns becomes the value assigned into the RUNDATE GVM when the transaction begins. In my case, I called the script "adate" and therefore would be assumed "adate.dal" and be a standard resource.

The script can do whatever it wants to determine the date, but I think you want to have it return in the YYYYMMDD format.

I was able to call a DAL doing it this way but I had to hardcode a date to get it to work.

Is there anyway that the DAL can look at values in the extract file to determine how the date should be set.

I need to look at other trn_fields or other values in the extract file to determine the date.

This is documaker 12.6 Standard Edition running 3 steps.

Just let me know if this is possible.

Below works for us. Can you do this.

< TRN_FIELDS >

RunDate = !/xpath/to/my/rundate

That would be the traditional way to map the RunDate - assuming you are using an XML extract. The question was whether you could call DAL to determine the Rundate in some other way than direct mapping in TRN_FIELDS.