Just wanted to thank everyone for their suggestions. Eventually, I ended up writing an external script and added a couple of flags to the underlying form. The attachment field isn't updated immediately, which is what I wanted, but it is updated in a few minutes, which is good enough for the customer.
When the long character fields are updated, status is changed to pending. An escalation runs on all records with a "Pending" status, running the script and creating the files with identifiable filenames, then sets the status to processed. A second escalation runs on all records with a status of "Processed" and does a PERFORM-ACTION-ADD-ATTACHMENT to pull the files into the attachment fields. Tried doing the above from filters - one immediate (`!) filter to push the values to another form for an immediate submit, next filter with a set fields $PROCESS$ to run the script and another filter to bring the files into the attachment fields. Several problems with this. The AR System didn't do the COMMIT action on the database for the immediately push (except on submit) until after the filter stack completed - kind of screwed up what data ended in the files. Another was that even with the set fields $PROCESS$, the files weren't available for the ADD-ATTACHMENT action. Which is why this is broken out into two separate escalations so that everything is complete before the next action occurs. Thanks again for the help, this was the last challenge to complete our data-driven notification feature for the help desk. Thanks, Roy Roy Ashcraft Systems Analyst SAIC [EMAIL PROTECTED] (402) 293-5218 _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at http://www.wwrug.org
