The CA Output Management Document Viewer (OMDV) does not support the emulator/HLLAPI I use. Will that support be added?

Products

• Output Management Document Viewer
• Output Management Web Viewer

Issue/Introduction

Description:

The emulator/HLLAPI that I use is not supported. Will support be added and if not why?

Solution:

No. The only 32bit HLLAPI drivers the OMDV supports are ATTACHMATE, IBM, NS/Portfolio, Reflection, RUMBA & TN3270.

As for why, the reason is part historical, but mostly it has to with cost, efficiency and performance. Many years ago, when one of the few ways you could get mainframe data onto a PC was through an emulator and its High Level Language Application Programming Interface, we supported the major players in that industry.
Since that time, CA developed an alternate mechanism called cooperative processing. Cooperative processing utilizes free CA components to afford you access to the data in your mainframe repositories from your PC.
Those free CA components are DRAS), CCI (which is a part of CA Common Services) and CCIPC (which is on your Output Management Document Viewer (OMDV) 2.1 disk). With cooperative processing, there is no need to have an emulator or HLLAPI on the PC. Further, you don't have to open a mainframe session, log into CA View and mark your reports for download, Instead, you simply start DocView (not the 32bit emulator, but DocView (OMDV) itself), connect to your MF Server/repository and you are presented with a reports list.
Click on a report from that list and you locally view the report on the PC. You may also save the report (make local) and/or export it into a variety of PC formats. Even the method described above, which is preferable to the old HLLAPI method, is an older, less flexible way of accessing the reports in your mainframe repository. The best way of getting to those reports still involves using cooperative processing, but does so from CA Technologies Output Management Web Viewer (OMWV). Instead of installing as client software like OMDV, OMWV installs on a Server within your network - no installs need be performed on your end-user's PCs. From their PC the end-user brings up a browser, accesses a web page running on the CA OMWV server, and logs into one or more virtual folders which contain the reports that are still housed in your mainframe based, CA report repositories.
This is the rationale for CA moving away from the antiquated HLLAPI, emulation and screen-scraping technology and toward cooperative processing.

Environment

Release:
Component: DVPC