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Forums Integration / Customization IPA/ProcessFlow

Concatenating Jobs on a Process Flow

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Tony Rubi
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12/17/2013 7:38 PM
We are creating a process flow and we need to concatenate a set of jobs, so that after the first job is completed the second one starts, and the third one starts after the second and so on...
Now we are creating a process flow and passing each job as a system command node, then putting a user action node after it so that it checks if the job is still active (with a web run).  The entire flow is working fine except that we have to wait at least one hour from one job to the next as the time out in the user action cannot be less than one hour.
Is there a way to concatenate them so that one job starts as soon as the previous one ends.
Is there an event that gets fired when a job stops with normal completion?
Bob Canham
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12/17/2013 7:57 PM
Rather than starting your job using the system command, you can use WebRun. The jobrun parameters [code]cgi-lawson/jobrun.exe[/code] can kick off a job and there is a &WAIT=TRUE parameter you can send so that the WebRun node doesn't move on until the job finishes. If you do that, you can just string your web run nodes together to kick off several jobs.

The syntax is:
[code] FUNC=run&USER=&JOB=&OUT=xml&WAIT=true[/code]

if you're using IPA you can also put [code]63[/code] in the success string field to know if it was a successful run or not.
Kyle Jorgensen
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12/17/2013 8:01 PM
Use the "WebRun" node to run the jobs. Set the 'wait' parameter to true. Have the output be XML. Have a node after the WebRun to check if the job completed normally (check for the string[code]63
We do this to automate back office reports that we publish in LBI as well as automate large chunks of our payroll processing.
Tony Rubi
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1/2/2014 3:18 PM
Thanks for the tip!
Now I have a couple of questions...
1) What if I don't get the STATUS 63? Should I loop back to the WebRun?
2) We put the WAIT in a job that took 42 minutes but the system only waited 13 minutes and then kicked in the next job. Why it didn't wait long enough?
Thanks for the help!
Kyle Jorgensen
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1/2/2014 3:43 PM
A status other than 63 means something went wrong with the job. You'll probably need to code the flow to notify someone to take a look at what's wrong. Something to note about these status codes; just because you got a status of 63 doesn't mean that the job did what it was suppose to. It just means the job finished successfully. However, every record could have encountered an error and wrote to an error file. We've incorporated a standard of doing a double-check on batch jobs. 1.) did the job finish successfully? 2.) did the job encounter any critical data errors?

If you use the 'wait' parameter, you'll need to make sure that the job timeout setting in WAS is set sufficiently high enough to accomodate your longest running job. I know that the setting is in WAS, unfortunately I'm on the programming side of our house and can't point you to the exact place where you set it. Perhaps others on this forum can.

Here's what the different job status mean:
[code] Status Translations : 00 : running 30 : Waiting 31 : Waiting Step 32 : Waiting on Time 33 : Waiting Recovery 34 : Needs Recovery 35 : Invalid Parameters 36 : Queue Inactive 37 : Hold 60 : Recurring Skipped 61 : Recovery Deleted 62 : Cancelled 63 : Normal Completion [/code]