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PSPCron
2014-11-27T01:30:13Z
Hi,
I have the following requirements which I am trying to meet and am struggling to with a single job...

I want a job with a task to be executed when both the following conditions are met -
  • after 9am each day
  • file has arrived in a directory

If the file has not arrived by 10am I want a notification that it has not. This could be achieved by triggering the job even though the file has not arrived - my task will then raise an error due to the file not being present and I will receive an email notification.

I have created a job which has the processing task and also has 2 dependent triggers -
  • Time event trigger for 9am each day
  • File event trigger to check when file has arrived in a directory


The problem is around how to trigger the job when the file has not arrived by a certain time. If I set the timeout on the File Event trigger to 60mins it is evaluated every 60 mins and the trigger fires. I want it to only evaluate when the time trigger has been activated, ie - only at 10am, not every 60 mins throughout the day


Effectively what I am after is a Control-M style "late shout" notification. In Control-M you configure the start time of a job and then you can also configure a "late shout" where if the job has not run by a certain time a notification is generated that it has not.

Appreciate any ideas / assistance. Thanks
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ErikC
2014-11-27T07:24:13Z
Hi Paul,

What you can do is create a job that triggers when the file is there (file trigger).
Have a time exception on this job, not running between 0 - 9 AM.
Have a task in this job setting a custom variable to true, so you know the file has been processed.

Have a second job, your check job, run at 10AM.
This checkes the custom variable value and if it's not set to true it sens you an e-mail.
It also has a task to set the custom variable back to false.

If the file is placed before 9AM and you still want to run the 1st job, you need to add a 9AM time trigger to that job and add some extra logic there.

Regards
Erik
Uses Visualcron since 2006.
al355
2014-11-27T09:51:16Z
We also have a few jobs which need this type of requirement. It would be great if Visual Cron had some built in 'late shout' functionality.
We currently use Trigger Expiration and then have a separate job which checks the status but this is a bit messy.
What we would like is for Trigger Expiration to fire an exception which could send an email
ErikC
2014-11-27T10:47:08Z
Originally Posted by: al355 

What we would like is for Trigger Expiration to fire an exception which could send an email


You should ask for this at the feature request section.

Regards,
Erik
Uses Visualcron since 2006.
Support
2014-11-27T15:25:23Z
I think, if you want to make it simple you should schedule a Time trigger to run at 10AM and have a List files Task. This Task will search for the file. By default it will raise an error if no file is found so you can easily attach a Notification to it. If the file is there you could create a second Task and do what you want to do with the file in a loop (looping the results of the previous Task).
Henrik
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al355
2014-11-27T15:32:45Z
This works but it would be really simple if the trigger expired and sent an email no?
Support
2014-11-27T15:41:30Z
Originally Posted by: al355 

This works but it would be really simple if the trigger expired and sent an email no?



I guess the OP wants it for every day. And there would be a lot of expirations during the day. It sounds like the critical point is at 10 only and hopefully a delay in triggering the file does not matter.
Henrik
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al355
2014-11-27T15:43:56Z
But you would only set the expiration action on the jobs where you wanted an email.
It seems like if it reaches 10am then he would like an email.
We have a lot of jobs like this, we need to be alerted if a file hasn't arrived by a certain time
Support
2014-11-27T15:46:06Z
Originally Posted by: al355 

But you would only set the expiration action on the jobs where you wanted an email.
It seems like if it reaches 10am then he would like an email.
We have a lot of jobs like this, we need to be alerted if a file hasn't arrived by a certain time



Right, but then the user has to re-activate the Trigger each day it fails.
Henrik
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al355
2014-11-27T15:47:43Z
Ah yes, I guess you would then have a master re-activate trigger job (not sure if that is possible)
al355
2014-11-27T15:53:30Z
In any case we would like the ability to run a notification if a trigger is disabled, would that be possible? (I can raise as a separate feature request).
Tied into this we would also like the ability to disable the pop ups if a trigger is disabled.
PSPCron
2014-11-27T23:36:23Z

Thanks for your assistance.

My preference is not to create additional jobs for this as we already have around 80 jobs which process arriving files. If we need another job for each it will become more of a pain to manage.

Anyway I suppose I’ll build it that way for the more critical ones and look forward to a future Cron release with late shout functionality or time controlled triggers which only activate and deactivate at specified times 🙂
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