Scheduling Jobs in Groups

Tidal Automation lets you organize your jobs into job groups to make it easier to manage and control jobs, and to make it more efficient to set job attributes. Jobs can inherit characteristics such as dependencies and calendars from their associated job group, eliminating the need to specify common job details for each job.

When a job group is added to the schedule manually, all of its member jobs (called child jobs) are added as well, saving you additional work and reducing the potential for mistakes. A job group can be configured the way a single job can be to depend on another job or job group.

In this exercise, we will create a job group called apmonth. apmonth will consist of two jobs, Ap31 and Ap32. We will make the Ap32 job dependent on the Ap31 job completing successfully. Once the apmonth job group has completed normally, Glfinal will run.

The chapter describes how to:

  • Define a job group.

  • Create jobs that belong to the group.

  • Schedule the job group.

  • Create a job that depends on a group.

  • Release the job group.

To complete the exercises in this tutorial, you need to:

  • Install Tidal Automation in the TA default directory (or the examples in this tutorial will not work properly).

  • Select the Super User option in your User definition.

  • Configure a default agent.

  • Create and have available the work day calendar.

Job Group Hierarchy

A job group is represented with a colored background. All of a group’s child jobs are indented underneath the group name. Each job group can include jobs and other job groups, which in turn can include other jobs and job groups. The window helps you visualize and navigate through the hierarchy of job groups. When you click the symbol to the left of a job group name, the display expands to show all of the jobs and job groups within the selected job group.

Job Group Scheduling

In this chapter we will develop a set of jobs under a job group, then schedule the jobs by submitting the job group only. We will do this by initially setting up the job group and its jobs as unscheduled (without an assigned calendar). This will prevent the jobs from entering the schedule before all the definitions are complete. We will then give the job group a calendar. We will set the child jobs to inherit the calendar so that all the jobs in the job group will be scheduled in one step.