Re: Automation.

On 5/10/2013 2:27 PM, John Mathew wrote:

I want to do something creative to my project or automation.

For example : Deleting a spool files which are older than 30 days.

the only reason is to survive in this competitive world we must achieve productivity

please share your thoughts/ knowledge.

Thanks in advance.

I think you are taking a course. That's great! It does limit the sort
of suggestions we can make for you though. For example, much of the
automation I implement is a direct result of work flow that happens
within my company. Some of that work flow is typical of most
businesses: Keeping track of bills and payments is one example. If I
worked for a company that refurbished suction dredge cutter heads, I'd
probably be automating steel stock inventory.

But when you're not yet working for a business, it is very difficult to
create an imaginary work flow that you can then proceed to automate.
That leaves us contemplating a work flow that doesn't involve customer
data. And that is going to be either operational work (like deleting
old spooled files) or programmer work.

Personally, I recommend you think about automating your own work flow.
After all, it's the thing you already have the most experience with.
Joel recently posted a question about comparing source files between two
libraries. This is a pretty interesting question for a programmer.
Best practice would have us using a change management system, which
would log all the changes made in each library. But not all of us have
such a system (there's one automation idea for you!)

In Joel's case, he wants to compare each source member in a source file
between library TEST and library PROD. He'd need to know the source
members which exist in one but not the other, a list of those which are
the same, which are changed and probably the lines which have changed
between them. That seems like a big job, and it is. The secret of
programming is to break each big job into smaller and smaller jobs until
you have reached a point where you can do the smaller jobs.

I think this utility is a good idea for something to learn how to automate.
--buck