code version check

[PeteM]

Is there a way to check the version of a data stage job i.e. compare lengths of the executable?

[FranklinE]

The dsx entry for each job starts with this:

Code: Select all

BEGIN HEADER
   CharacterSet "CP1252"
   ExportingTool "IBM InfoSphere DataStage Export"
   ToolVersion "8"
   ServerName "name"
   ToolInstanceID "project name string"
   MDISVersion "1.0"
   Date "2017-06-15"
   Time "15.06.57"
   ServerVersion "11.5"
END HEADER

Is this what you're looking for?

[UCDI]

That isnt kept up automatically.

I just checked an old job that has had many revisions and it says

MDISVersion "1.0"


Is there something you have to DO to make it work?

What we do is keep a comment field in each job with the latest change date. Its the only thing we have found to be reliable across servers and projects etc. There is a cross project compare, but it is a little flakey. Comparing DSX files works but I had to write custom code to ignore some lines that had embedded server names and other stuff that is irrelevant.

[Mike]

I've gone with a 2 step approach for identifying version change candidates.

Step 1 is to compare the modification timestamps using XMETA. These are the same modification timestamps that you would see with an advanced find using the Designer client. This does require read access to the XMETA repository. And it does potentially result in some false positives (e.g. job may appear to have been modified based on the timestamps even when there is no identifiable version difference).

Step 2 is to take everything out of step 1 and run the cross project compare from the command line. This will eliminate the false positives from step 1 and give you a nice report of changes for those with actual version changes. As UCDI mentioned, the cross project compare is not 100% reliable, so watch out for failed comparisons.

Mike

[chulett]

That isnt kept up automatically.

I seem to recall this being true all the way back to the 3.x versions that I started with... it had to be manually incremented to make use of the field which of course meant it was hardly ever (sometimes also known as never) 'correct'. Guess that hasn't really changed.