SAP SaaS-Solution Business ByDesign has a Print API, which allows you to spool print jobs to be fetched remotely over the Web. Decoding this API is one of the biggest mess I've ever seen. Anyway, finally I got it right and now I've got a nice ruby printer spooler which you can put in your crontab. It polls the print queue of ByDesign, retrieves …

bydesign_printer.rb

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'savon'
require 'tempfile'
require 'base64'

USER = 'PRT_001'
PASS = 'YOUR_PASSWORD_GOES_HERE'
SAP_BASE_URL = 'https://my012345.sapbydesign.com'
ENDPOINT = "#{SAP_BASE_URL}/sap/bc/srt/scs/doc/printqueuewebservice3"
OUTPUT_DIR = "/tmp"

# Initialize SOAP Connection to ByDesign
client = Savon.client(:endpoint => ENDPOINT,
                      :namespace => 'http://sap.com/xi/SAPGlobal20/Global',
                      :basic_auth => [USER, PASS],
                      :log => false)

# Retrieve the queue
r = client.call('PrintQueueWebService3GetAllQueueRequest')
queues_info = r.body[:print_queue_web_service3_get_all_queue_response][:queues_info]
id = queues_info[:id]
description = queues_info[:description]
$stderr.puts "*** Found queue #{id} (#{description})"
raise "*** ERROR: No PDF queue" if queues_info[:format_desc] != 'PDF'
uuid = queues_info[:uuid]

# Retrieve next item in the queue
has_next_item = false
begin
  r = client.call('PrintQueueWebService3GetNextItemInfoRequest', :message => {
                    'QueueUUID' => uuid} )
  this_item = r.body[:print_queue_web_service3_get_next_item_info_response]
  has_next_item = this_item[:has_next_item]
  item_uuid = this_item[:item_uuid]
  if item_uuid == nil
    $stderr.puts "*** No more items to print found"
  else
    # We actually found one item to print
    name = this_item[:document_name]
    copies = this_item[:output_copy_number_value]
    doc_uuid = this_item[:documents][:document_uuid]
    $stderr.puts "*** Found Document #{name || doc_uuid} with #{copies} copies"
    if this_item[:documents][:document_type] != 'MAIN' ||
       this_item[:documents][:document_mime_type] != 'application/pdf'
      raise "*** ERROR: No PDF document"
    end
    r = client.call('PrintQueueWebService3RetrieveDataRequest', :message => {
                      'DocumentUUID' => doc_uuid,
                      'BufferSizeKB' => 0 })
    data = r.body[:print_queue_web_service3_retrieve_data_response]
    raise "*** ERROR: Could not retrieve document" if data[:end_of_file] != true
    pdf_base64 = data[:binary_data]
    time = Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S')
    filename = "#{OUTPUT_DIR}/bydesign-#{time}-#{doc_uuid}.pdf"
    File.write(filename, Base64.decode64(pdf_base64))
    $stderr.puts "*** Sending to print queue"
    system("lpr #{filename}")
    r = client.call('PrintQueueWebService3SetItemStatusRequest', :message => {
                      'ItemUUID' => item_uuid,
                      'ExecutionStatusCode' => 'S',
                      'ProcessingResultDescription' =>
                        "Successfully printed on #{time} via ruby" })
  end
end while has_next_item
$stderr.puts "*** All done"