[cups.general] Print Accounting

[Jerome Alet]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 01:19:54PM -0700, Dan Tappin wrote:
> I looked at pykota but no where does it say that it can track printing 
> on a user supplied code basis.

For the very good reason that, as you saw by yourself, PyKota doesn't
support this functionnality yet.

However, storing the billing code is planned for the next stable
release, so provided you've got some driver which asks this code to
you can can send it to your CUPS server, PyKota will store it along
with username, job's title, size, and so on in its print job
history.

Depending on the database backend you'll use with PyKota, either PostgreSQL
or LDAP, you'll either be able to create real time invoices directly
from OpenOffice (untested with MSOffice) through ODBC/JDBC, or through
a CSV dump and import into your favorite spreadsheet.

The code is almost ready, but THIS WON'T fix the driver or printing 
client problem : PyKota trusts datas it receives from CUPS, but CUPS 
can't assign a billing code if the client software can't ask it, and
so the field in PyKota's database (or CUPS' page_log BTW) will be
empty.

hth

Jerome Alet