Quickie Answer = Job Scheduler

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

The mad scientists & BPCS 405 CD experimenters at Central Industries finally
managed to get a BPCS program to run off the Job Scheduler without blowing up
our laboratory.  The lessons we learned to help us design our next
Frankenstein are as follows:

On-Line BPCS Programs have a Job-Id that is based on the work station session
that the user is signed onto.  BPCS uses that naming convention to store RULES
on where the reports are to print, number copies, hold?, jobq & related
goodies.  When a job is running off of the Job Scheduler, the Job-Id is that
of the name that was assigned to the job when it was placed on the Job
Scheduler & later when we conclude we want some other name, you cannot rename
it or copy it, you gotta transcribe it.

The solution we used was to insert into the CL various DEFAULT values that
would be used if there was a failure to access the BPCS values, such as "Put
this sucker on HOLD in one particular outputq that is not used for anything
else."

Proposed scheme - name Job Scheduler Jobs after the names of Work Stations, so
the CL will go get the latest values from the right name.

Devil's advocate - hard coding work station identities into Job Scheduler
might not be the smartest move when configurations continue to be somewhat
liquid - ie they periodically get changed - it might be smarter to re-educate
ourselves how BPCS stores work station rules & add a few non-existant dummy
display stations to the collection that would in reality be like variations on
user names, giving their standard preferences by facility, for the purpose of
tying that into Job Schedule Naming - e.g. QC reports for facility 40 would
use phony work station id QC40, which would work only so long as there is no
display station called QC40.

Al Macintyre
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