Switch Imposition Ganging Workflow

[msierra]

Has anyone tried to or has created an Imposition Ganging Workflow with Switch or Switch with use of third party configurator?

Would need to gang PDF files for imposing based on a series of rules. Would like to impose files with Switch workflow. Would be ideal if switch Workflow can further process imposed files to create individual files for given separations. Final output would be PDF.

Ganging Rules;
SLA ( (SLA-Fulfillment Process Time) would be used as release trigger)
Company
Product Width and Height
Colorants contained in file
Substrate
Order Quantity

[cstevens]

I've created a few. Your solution is probably going to depend on what imposition software you want to use, what kind of throughput you need, and you'll almost surely end up needing to do at least some basic scripting. Most of the configurators are pretty basic in regards to logic, so you'll need to do the grouping upstream and provide a sorted list of files to the configurator.

If you have anything specific that gets added to the imposed file (i.e. barcode data) then you'll probably have to go outside the configurators and generate XML or some other data that the imposition software vendor supports.

It may also depend on what printing software you're sending the ganged file to, and if you need to provide any of that information in another data format (i.e. JDF).

[msierra]

Thank you cstevens for reply. This is good information and will assist with planning what software[s] we employ to achieve objective. Ideally we would want our Dev Team to build grouping logic into our proprietary back-end workflow solution but they are a bit taxed right now with a tight delivery time to a large project. Seems Switch would be good candidate to use for building grouping logic and releasing grouped files based on rules.

[cstevens]

If you're able to inject some kind of metadata with the job then Switch does a great job of sorting based on metadata values, file names etc. However, things can get complex if you have vary large value sets that you want to sort on, or there aren't a pre-defined set of values to sort on.

For example: Sorting on number of colors in the file is probably pretty straight forward, but if you have 50+ different substrates to sort on then the flow will quickly get out of hand.

[msierra]

Yes, we would have to submit metadata along with PDF. Below is a concept of xml that would submit with PDF. We are still not completely clear to the total amount of substrates involved but I agree that if 50+ it would get out of hand. We have submitted a lot of questions that have yet to be answered so right now a bit in limbo. One question in particular relates to, if an Order contains 2-Sides, which in our world means 2 separate PDF files. I will have to review the Sort Job element. We were trying to think of a way to minimize values by adding some logic to front-end that can supply one unique value to xml that can be used to sort incoming jobs. Of course when we started going that route it begged I question, "Then why don't we just build the grouping logic into our front-end?"

I do thank you for your responses and as we move along I may, if you don't mind, propose to you some questions. Thanks again.



<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<grouping_data xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<SLA>5</SLA>
<CompanyName>Complete Cleaning</CompanyName>
<ProductID>BC</ProductID>
<EngravingColors>
<Separation>PANTONE 354</Separation>
<Separation>PANTONE Reflex Blue</Separation>
</EngravingColors>
<Substrate>16pt</Substrate>
<NumberOfSides>1</NumberOfSides>
<Side>1</Side>
</grouping_data>

[cstevens]

From my understanding Sort job is kind of the legacy method for doing this type of thing. I would use the XML pickup feature combined with the option "Condition with variables defined" on the outgoing connectors.

Given a flow like this:



You can select one of the connections coming out of "Folder 1" and select the option for "Condition with variables defined" then create a path to the location in your XML where you want to sort based on some condition. In this example I sorted all jobs with ProductID of "BC" to the upper folder, and "PB" (just guessing here) to the lower folder. You can also use the "All other jobs" option to route any jobs that don't match a certain criteria.



Switch is pretty flexible with the logic and types of sorting you can do with this option.

You can also do a count of returned elements, so for example in your XML you had two Separations defined. You can do a query to that element location (/grouping_data/EngravingColors/Separation ) use the count function to return a "2" which you could then use to route to a number of colors folder or something.

(Credit to Freddy P. for showing me how to do this )