DSXchange

Hi All,

When creating a job from a template, you are requested to enter a job name for the job being created. If underscores are used, the 'Alphanumerics and Spaces are not allowed in job names' error is returned.

Is this a known issue? Because on completion [with the underscores removed] , I can rename the job with underscores with no problem.

Has anyone else come across this?

Thanks,

Does anyone seriously use templates? In the training couse I was advised that they are stored on the client, not the server. What's more, I was also told that you could store them on a network drive (don't know whether this is true or not). This creates a deployment nightmare.

We just have a Server Job category of TEMPLATES in the DS repository. When you create a new job, you open the template job and SAVE AS a new job name.

The way my grapevine told it, DataStage is ranked against other ETL tools based on a series of known criteria. One of those is "Create Job from Template". Ascential wanted to be able to tick that box (so as not to lose an easy ranking point) whilst expending the least effort and expense developing a basically redundant feature. Hellooooo, Feature Bloat.

I do make serious use of a Template, which contains the standard set of job parameters for the project. (Yes, I know, I should be pushing Parameter Manager.) We do put the template on a shared drive, and change the Registry to point to there.

The issue with underscores is a bug, pure and simple, probably programmers working to different specifications.

Specifications?

I gave it a serious tilt, we had a lot of dispersed users without much knowledge, I wanted templates to work so they could create new jobs without having to copy and rename existing jobs.

In the end the process for updating these templates was too time consuming, there were a few steps involved in loading a template, modifying it and saving it again.

It was difficult to set the template directory as most users couldn't change it once it was installed. They did not have update rights to the registry entry. (Big company, stern desktop policy). There was no way to guarantee that all users could access the same shared folder.

It just became easier to have a DataStage category called template jobs and to store actual jobs in there that people used for parameter management (via the parameter copy routine) and for new jobs (via copy, rename and move).

I think templates and wizards have only been half implemented and I am hoping they are something they get write in Hawk. The templates need to be stored on the server rather then the client and they need to be easier to update.

rleishman wrote:Ascential wanted to be able to tick that box (so as not to lose an easy ranking point) whilst expending the least effort and expense developing a basically redundant feature. Hellooooo, Feature Bloat.

Shiny objects to dazzle the eye during sales presentations. Poor implementation on the backend...

Concept good, implementation bad. It's easier to just keep "template" jobs in a folder/project. The whole registry thing is a nightmare, plus client side to boot. You can't be on the network, you have to be on the Windoze network to see templates. Everything's stored in the DS repository and available in the .dsx file, except Templates? What's up with that?

The problem I had was developers destroying the template jobs by opening them, developing in them, and clicking Save.

I maintain the templates on the shared drive using Notepad - a template is an XML-tagged DSX file.

Good point Ray. For the "Template Folder" people out there, there was an interesting idea in a recent post to make jobs read-only by CHMODing the job files in the Project home directory.

Is this what it feels like to be off-topic?