MapThat Admin – Scale Printing on Two Servers

Question

What settings do I need to apply in order to create SCALE Print PDF output files on two MapThat Servers?

Answer

If you have setup two or more servers for MapThat in your live environment (for load balancing) and users access MapThat via a shared URL, then you will need to ensure that the Scale Print Services are correctly setup on all servers and the output files are written to each server. This means that no matter which server is used to create the Print Job, the Print Job is picked up, a PDF created and then successfully saved to all servers.

Remember that the list of Print Jobs in the Scale Print tool is populated by listing all records in your MT_PRINT_JOBS table, so no matter which server is being used to access MapThat this list will be the same.

To ensure that the users do not get an Internet 404 page missing error when they click on the ‘Download File’ link, the Print PDFs must be saved/stored on all servers. This means that even if the user try’s to download the Print Job on an alternate server to the one that created the job, the download will be successful.

In order to do this you can use the MT_ADMIN_SETTINGS PDF_LOCATION value to reference multiple servers by using a comma delimiter between the server names. For example, if you have two servers, one called DC1 and the other DC2 and the output folder on those is MTPrintedFiles, then the value should read: 

\\DC1\MTPrintedFiles\,\\DC2\MTPrintedFiles\

In order for this to work those folders on each server must be ‘shareable’, so use the Folder Properties and allow write access to that folder. This will ensure that if the Print Job is ran on server DC1, the output PDF file can also be written to DC2.

 Please refer to your DynamicMaps Scale Print Guide for full details.