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POS Reload

DynaPOSTouch need to do a reload in order to get a set of all data required to run POS - items, discounts, tenders, till definitions, and so on. There are two types of reloads available - Item Reload and Config Reload. An Item Reload will reload all data. A Config Reload will load all data except item data.

Reloads can be requested from POS or from the backoffice. Regardless of where the request is made, the actual reload is performed at POS. The following steps are performed.

• POS asks MCS to do a reload. It will tell MCS all the System Settings it requires and a list of tables for which data is required. If this is a Config Reload, POS will not request the ITEM, ITEMTAXGROUP or ITEMMODIFIER tables.

• MCS performs a set of queries to get the require data. The results of these queries are written to *.BIN files in a data directory on the server. The directory is of the form posdata\x where posdata is the root directory (specified by the POS Data option in System Settings - usually \ drsapps\posdata) and x is the till number. MCS will then zip those *.BIN files into a file called POSDATA.ZIP. MCS then returns control to POS to say the data is ready.

• POS will request MCS to send the POSDATA.ZIP file to it. The file is downloaded in chunks to reduce server load. The file is saved to a directory on the POS called \ drsapps\dynapos\data\x\DOWNLOAD, where x is the till number. Once the file is downloaded, it is unzipped to produce the *.BIN files originally produced by MCS.

• If this is a Item Reload, POS will copy the ITEM.*, ITEMTAX.* and ITEMMODIFIER.* tables from \ drsapps\dynapos\data\x (where x is the till number) to \ drsapps\dynapos\data\x\temp.

• POS will delete all the files in the \ drsapps\dynapos\data\x directory.

• If this was a Item Reload, POS will copy the files from \ drsapps\dynapos\data\x\temp back to \ drsapps\dynapos\data\x.

• POS reads each of the *.BIN files and produces an equivalent DBISAM table in \ drsapps\dynapos\data\x.

• POS has now finished the reload.

Points to note:

There is no process to delete data from the \ drsapps\posdata directories on the server. It is assumed that each time a POS does a reload this data will be overwritten. Since a POS will do a reload on a fairly regular basis, it is assumed that this is simply required diskspace, just like the space taken up by the STORERNG records for the location in the actual database.

The same thinking applies to the \ drsapps\dynapos\x\download and \ drsapps\dynapos\x\temp directories on the POS.