Reverse Overlay

[GlendaRegpala]

We are using Overlay in one of our Application Groups.   The source file is Text then after loading we see the 'built' form in OnDemand.   Is there a way to reverse this process and get the text file?   Basically, I need to see the original Text Data.  I tried arsdoc get and the output is not readable.   Could there be a way to read this outside of OnDemand?   Just wondering if anyone has done something similar to this.

Thank you.

[pankaj.puranik]

Is this form some kind of a table?
Do you use arp2pdf transforms?
Are you using a thin cliet/web application to pull this text file?
Did you try pulling the txt file using the Ondemand thick client?

Lots of questions

[GlendaRegpala]

The form is an 'overlay' for generic indexer, and this is creating an AFP object.   Not sure if I'm using the right terminologies here... I wasn't part of the original group that designed/installed this.   

We are not using arp2pdf transforms.

Our web application pulls this document as AFP using the AFP Viewer but I want to extract only the text portion.

With the OnDemand thick client, the best I can do is save the item as 'ASCII' and it will give me a text file output, but it has part of the source text file and the overlay texts mixed up.   There is also a way to get this ASCII format through ODWEK Java API (so we can do in batch, instead of individually pulling up items).    This is so far our best bet ... although it needs a lot of work to get the resulting text file deciphered...for example, the last name and first name are concatenated (no space in between... hard to tell where the last name ends).

Thank you for your questions... in case anyone has a better solution than saving as ASCII... please share      

[GlendaRegpala]

Solution to this is ARSVIEW.

Thanks to the IBM guy who worked on my PMR... at first he thought there is no built-in way to do this, but still continued researching even after I closed the PMR.  Then sent me email today to check on ARSVIEW command... tried it... and worked!!!

Hope someone else finds this helpful.