Does anyone in Epicor hosted cloud use Print Station? If so how do you setup your labels to pull data from Epicor? We’re going on on-prem to hosted cloud (I know… I know…) but we have some “reprint” and other labels that use Print Station which currently pulls data from Epicor via ODBC. We can’t obviously do ODBC in hosted cloud so curious how others have setup their labels.
I don’t know how to do the print station part when the label needs to read from Epicor. Maybe you can use an external rest call in the label? I know there is VB inside the label…
You might want to reach out to Manny Castro at bartender. He would probably be able to help you.
I am going way off the deep end here, but you could make your own version of print station where you list the label files and if you know the data needed for each label you could send that rest request to epicor and then send the response JSON to a bartender web integration that accepts it and prints the label specified.
ODBC / OLE DB access to your Kinetic Epicor Cloud data is available if you opted for the Signature bundle or if you purchased the Production Database Copy option.
If you do not have the Production DB Copy, there are options. Epicor Cloud does offer a secured FTP option for generating reports / labels / files on the server and then transferring the files for local processing (many of the Cloud Bartender customers are setup this way). As Utah references, you could also make a REST call using a BAQ to get specific data elements.
1 Like
Good points Rich, looking forward to seeing you at insights.
Wait, a Bartender label can make a REST call? That was my plant but I didn’t see REST as a possible datasource.
Yes, the auto-print labels will use the FTP I’m just talking about Print Station type that not generated via BPM.
Randy, I truly feel like you are going to be able to make a rest call to get your data- I just don’t know where to do it. I don’t think that you can do it as a data source though. You may wish to reach out to Manny for more options/ideas.
Out of curiosity based on your use case, I was playing around with the Forms functionality in bartender designer and you could make a form for each of the labels that on validation runs a script that does a REST call to get the data you need for the label. You could use the form to define text boxes that collect the parameters you need to get the relevant data (i.e. packnum, ordernum, partnum, etc.).
In any case, I apologize I don’t have a finished solution for you, but I feel like it’s possible. There are so many ways to make a rest call and then feed it to a label. I just don’t know if print station is going to allow for this. In other words, if you are going to use print station to print a label that requires external data, you are either going to have to find a way to do it in the label OR maybe you can print the label not using print station (i.e. baq report like rich said, or a custom program). I’ll keep looking around to see what’s out there. You have me intrigued in this problem.
Hey Utah, I hopefully can reach out to Manny for details. What I was hoping to do was convert our existing labels that directly call the Epicor database to use a REST call to a BAQ to pull the data instead.
You should be able to do that somehow. Print station is a nice utility, I would hate to have to ditch that and use some other method.
Talked with BT Sales and they’re saying there is no way for a Print Station label to make a REST call. I’m asking for permission to get with Manny.
1 Like
I agree with BT Sales based on what I have been able to find, but Manny may be able to come up with something that works, but isn’t out-of-the-box, something sales isn’t privy to.
Yeah I couldn’t find anyway in the label designer to use REST to retrieve data from a data source. I told Sales that it’s a feature more people will probably want as REST is getting more popular as a integration method and the reason they’ve added REST API to Bartender but just for ERP-to-Bartender.
What I am thinking is that you should be able to launch a workflow from a label and the workflow can make rest calls to get data.
Normally, I prefer the pull method of workflow, but not so much for printers. 
What is the benefit of having the label station GET data vs a POST with the data already in it? 
I agree with you, I would post the data to BT web service and print the data on a label
Here’s the thing, he would like to initiate this call to print from Bartender Print station- which doesn’t have the data… so are we in a situation where we can do what you are suggesting?
Short of re-creating print station in epicor, I don’t know how we would do that.
So, I’m unfamiliar with the BT Print Station. (Maybe you can explain it to me, benefits, etc).
I’m about having the BPM do the POST. But to make it a little more resilient, I would post to a queue and another process would pick it up and send it to the BT Webservice. This gives me the ability to reprint labels, or alter alter the data (GET), create ranges of labels, dynamically choose printers, etc.
Maybe that’s what print station does for you. I just don’t know.
Mark, I will defer to bartender documentation and website to explain print station/the bartender tool suite.
Print Station (seagullscientific.com)
In short, bartender does everything you listed above, although they do it using a set of products they’ve developed.
I think Randy would like to leverage those instead of building his own. I could be dead wrong. Not sure I understand everything.
I may be overthinking all of this. I am glad you are in the mix.
Hey Mark, Print Station is Bartender app for “on demand” printing a labels. A user selects from a list of available templates, answers a set a predetermined questions (Job/Part #, etc) and then the label queries the Epicor database (using ODBC) and prints the label. It’s very manual and we plan to move most of them to BPM triggered labels after our E10 to Kinetic upgrade. But for the upgrade, we need to uplift them, however being on hosted cloud, we don’t have ODBC access for Bartender to see the Epicor data.
Ah, gotcha. We have the same thing written in MSAccess. Pick a label, ODBC into Epicor, …
I looked through the Print Station documentation online and didn’t see where the ODBC was defined. You’re in that gray area where you don’t want to put too much work to get it going knowing there will be a rewrite in the not too distant future.
Maybe you can do Change Data Capture and have the webhook update a local SQL Server that Print Station could connect to? Just throwing out ideas…
1 Like
I love your ideas mark, not a bad idea there.
Yeah the ODBC connection is defined in the report that you print from print station.