Fishbowl Integration with eFORMz

Fishbowl is a warehouse management solution (WMS) that uses JasperReports to create reports. When printing a report to your virtual printer from Fishbowl, the file will be blank and only 1KB. To be able to use eFORMz with Fishbowl, we need to make some changes to a Fishbowl file and add a .jar file to the classpath.

Step 1
Add the eFORMz Java Print Service Provider jar file (eFORMzPrinter.jar) to the Fishbowl/lib folder.

Step 2

Go to the Fishbowl/client/bin folder and open the Fishbowl Client.vmoptions file. This file can be opened with Notepad or Notepad++.

Add the following line at the bottom of the file:

-DefzPrintServicesDefaultDirectory=<config directory>

The <config directory> refers to a directory created to contain the PrintServices.xml file. It is also the directory that will contain the folders for the intercepted output from Fishbowl. Typically, we use /minisoft or /opt/minisoft.

If you look at the list of printers when you try to print from Fishbowl there should be two new printers, Printer1 and Printer2. You can use either printer to print.

If you go to the Minisoft/printerservices folder, depending on which printer you printed to, there should be a folder named Printer1 or Printer2. In this folder you will find files with the .efd format. You can use the file in this folder in the eFORMz Composer.