Progress of Job Sequence

[ray.wurlod]

With server jobs, you can "display performance statistics" in the job design and watch what's happening - provided you don't mind the impact on throughput that your interference causes!

Some form of visual indication in a Job Sequence of progress would be really nice to have. For example, highlighting/selecting an Activity that is currently being executed.

I have some quite long sequences of things that take place one after another. There are parallel streams, and decision paths (both through triggers and nested conditions). It would be good to be able to see in Designer what's going on - something as simple as showing the border of the Activity or changing its background color when that Activity is active (doing whatever it does) would suffice.

The only alternative at the moment is to switch to Director log view for the job sequence.

[logic]

Also It would be good if a option to "insert all parameters",(Something similar to match columns in the transformer),can be added to the External parameter helper window. It would help in selecting all values, instead of selecting one by one, while inserting parameters in a job activity within a sequence
Thanks

[vmcburney]

Agree, the time consuming setting of parameters in job activity stages is one of the worst parts of sequence jobs. Plus in 7.5.1 they took away the ability to copy and paste a job activity, change the job name and retain parameter settings. Plus the cancel button on job activity stages does not always work and will not roll back all changes.

[ray.wurlod]

At at least one of my client sites I crafted a routine to load parameter values into a job sequence from a standard set. It should not be a long stretch to load from these into Job Activities.

Hmm... would this be reinventing the wheel? Can Parameter Manager already do this?

[vmcburney]

Don't think so, Parameter Manager and the parameter copy routine only modify job parameters, not job activity stages. Job parameters are easy to get to within the DataStage repository, job activity stages are buried in the job control code field with some fairly cryptic parameter naming. For example:

Code: Select all

p$V4S15$15 = (PROCESS_DATE)
err#code = DSSetParam(h$V4S15, "PROCESS_DATE", p$V4S15$15)

You could write a routine similar to copy parameters that hacked the job control code, anyone know what the table and field name is for job control code? DS_JOBOBJECTS?

[ray.wurlod]

No, you don't need to do anything with the code. You copy parameter settings into the Job Activity objects (in DS_JOBOBJECTS) and require that the job sequence be compiled subsequently.

[vmcburney]

Of course, I had it back to front, trying to modify the generated code instead of the underlying objects.

[ray.wurlod]

Of course, DataStage BASIC is a powerful enough language that you could modify the code. But how would you then compile it?!!