01. Print & Spool System

Print & Spool System

The main tasks of the SAP spool system are the processing and administration of print requests as well as the administration of output devices and their mapping in the SAP System

Information Flow

The R/3 System recognizes several classes of documents (for example, SAPscript texts or report lists) that can be printed.

When a request is made to print a document, a spool request is created. A spool request has two parts:

Administrative information (origin, date, author name, logical printer) is stored in the R/3 database

The data to be printed is stored in a repository called the temporary sequential database (TemSe). The R/3 Spool System uses generic representations of printer formatting commands and the R/3 internal character set to represent the characters to be printed.

TemSe data can be stored inside the R/3 database or at operating system level. Profile parameter rspo/store_location (see SAP Note 20176) determines where TemSe is located:

db stores the data in the database (default)

G stores the data in an operating system file in the global directory

The preparation of a spool request for printing is an output request. In R/3, you can either print immediately (an output request is generated immediately) or delay printing (the spool request does not lead immediately to an output request). A spool can correspond to several output requests. These can be sent to different output devices.

Usually (but not in certain printing scenarios), the R/3 System generates a device-specific, print-ready output stream, which is sent via an operating system spooler to a printer.

You can configure your R/3 instance to run multiple spool work processes. This affects sequential request processing.

Output requests are usually sent to the spool server in the order they were created, but if more than one spool work process is configured, the requests may be printed in a different order.

If necessary, you can specify that output requests are transmitted to the host spool system in the order they were generated. This option causes request processing for this device to be restricted to a single work process within the spool server. A spool work process is temporarily reserved for this device, and all output requests for this device are stored in an internal queue in the reserved work process. Once the internal queue has been processed, the reserved work process is released.