We have 1 major load of our data every night. All reports should run after the load is finished. The load start at 12:00 midnight and usually finishes at 3:30AM but sometimes doesn't finish till 5:00AM. Report caster jobs are scheduled to start at 4:00AM. We are running Windows 2000 Server. I was thinking of just having the load job stop the ReportCaster service at the beginning of the job and then restarting it at the end of the load. This way the report jobs we automaticly be delayed if the load job was running late.

Has anyone tried this ?

We have ReportCaster installed without MRE.
So we have no Alert feature. We also can't update the NEXTRUNTIME the way we're set up.
What I've done is write a flag file out when Data Marts are loaded, kick reportcaster off with a dialogue manager loop that does a DOS STATE command looking for the flag file, if not found, SLEEP a bit. Works great, yes it ties up agents but gets the job done.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Carol, can you show us the code for kicking off the caster job from dm?
i understand the state command...is SLEEP a command??

Hi Susannah,
Here's the code......
I set up multiple tasks where I issue the DOS STATE command once more, if the file's not found, I set &&KILRPC = 'Y'
The reason I do this is, if the job should time out because our batch never completes (once or twice a year) the next task will run. I can post that code also if you need it. Under tasks click Advanced and I think there's a pre task execution.

-SET &ECHO=ALL;
-SET &&KILL_RPC = 'N';
APP PREPENDPATH PRS
-RUN
-* kick the job off at 6:00 am every day ???
-SET &CNTR = 0;
-RESTART2
-SET &CNTR = &CNTR + 1;
SLEEP 60
-RUN
-IF &CNTR GE 480 GOTO THEEND;
-* kill the job after 8 hours!
-*
-* Note: zero is a good return code
DOS STATE \\IMPRS01\APPS\PMS\DATA\PAFLAG.DAT
-IF &RETCODE NE 0 GOTO NOFLAG;
-*
-* wait a minutes and check again
SLEEP 60
-RUN
-* when flag is found, run Reports
-SET &&PORTFOLIO = 'AEMBS';
EX RC_YPORTAPP
-RUN
-* tasks are set up in RC job to other reports
-GOTO THEEND
-RUN
-*
-NOFLAG
-GOTO RESTART2
-RUN
-*
-THEEND

ah! i see. you're not actually calling caster via dm, you're running a job in caster which itself contains dm that executes some embedded code, or not, ... and SLEEP is a focus command. ah. i get it. Thanks for posting.

Sorry for the confusion. Yes, this is in the ReportCaster job to replace the Alert feature that we don't have.

I don't think the SLEEP command is WebFOCUS - it's Windows. You need a Windows Resource Kit to activate this command.

http://www.robvanderwoude.com/index.html

hmmm. i just tried it
SLEEP 10
on just some car file read.
worked.
i am in fact on a windows server, tho. maybe thats why

What is the rational of only having the alert feature available in mre?