Comments on: Unexpected results in data

By: pt0505

pt0505 — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:04:10 +0000

Are you ever expecting info to be held by your program from one TP job to the next? Or will every TPA job expect to work only with its own data elements?

No – every TP job is a new job and should not have any data left over from when the previous job ran. All of the internal fields in the program are being cleared when a new job starts.

If data elements are stored by your program from one TP job to the next, what kind of data store are you putting the data into?

Most of the fields (2 others are character) in the program that are being used and cleared, are numeric fields. They are initialized to 0 and blanks in the CLEAR subroutine.

By: tomliotta

tomliotta — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:23:34 +0000

my custom program is being called – as this batch job is running

My apologies for working past that element, but there are two major categories of problems involving ‘batch’ that are different from ‘interactive’. Parameter lists and library lists tend to lead in very different directions. Now we can say that this is running ‘batch’ rather than ‘interactive’ and pay attention to different elements. (“Interactive” refers to the interaction with a person through a direct interface — a terminal.)

Your actual question –

A main software program is setup to run several times overnight in a single threaded job queue.

That indicates that multiple (TP) jobs start and end. Each individual job may call your program some number of times.

Are you ever expecting info to be held by your program from one TP job to the next? Or will every TPA job expect to work only with its own data elements?

If data elements are stored by your program from one TP job to the next, what kind of data store are you putting the data into?

Tom

By: pt0505

pt0505 — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:17:19 +0000

There is a job that is submitted in batch – that is doing the translation of the X12 file. Inside that TP’s software – my custom program is being called – as this batch job is running (maybe I am using the wrong terminology?) That job is passing element data to my program – and passing info back into the job – hundreds (if not 1000s) of times during this translations.

By: tomliotta

tomliotta — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:01:56 +0000

Although “/program/” may be correct, the problem is with the word “interactively”. That’s what doesn’t make complete sense since this doesn’t seem to be related to an interactive aspect of the process. I was hoping to be certain that you mentioned this for a reason that wasn’t clear to me.

Note that journaling would only be temporary. It would be used while tracking which job was the actual source of inaccurate rows and what the exact timestamps of the file transactions were. That info would give a timeline that should point exactly to the points of problems.

Then journaling would be ended and all elements could be deleted. Mostly it would be treated like a temporarily enabled trace log.

Tom

By: tomliotta

tomliotta — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:50:34 +0000

(which will call my /program/ interactively)

First, that comment doesn’t make sense. Yet, you clearly intended to say it; so, it seems like it ought to be important. Since it’s almost guaranteed that it’s not an “interactive” call, you must have intended to say something else. Can you elaborate, please?

Next, are the files journaled? If not, then there may be no good way to track anything down. You won’t be able to tell which job was responsible for adding an inaccurate row or updating a row incorrectly.

Start journaling on the file and review the resulting journal entries. They should remove most of the guesswork.

Tom