Trigger Events with a File in Robot Schedule 12

Exchanging data between different operating systems is a very common practice in today’s server communication. In some cases, we have written our own code to react to these kinds of events. In other cases, we may have someone running a menu option manually to check for the file or have a never ending program that checks for the files 24 hours a day.

The newly released Robot Schedule version 12 has just made this area very simple. The new event monitoring feature can monitor for files from the IFS or a library on IBM i. Once the file is received, the event triggers a reactive job in Robot Schedule. To put it another way, any file that is added, deleted, changed, or crosses a size threshold can cause the dependency to occur in Robot Schedule.

Additional functionality includes the use of generics on the file names so that you can specify directories like /home/ifsdir/todaysfile*. This ability allows Robot Schedule to manage the variability of a new file name.

You may want to send this new name, which changes with each transmission, to a program. Dynamic parameters in Robot Schedule (a.k.a. reserved command variables) can be updated and then used in the command line of your Robot Schedule job. It would look a little something like this: call bankpgm parm(‘@@DATE’ ‘@@TODFILE’) where @@DATE equals today’s date in system format and @@TODFILE equals the name of the file.

These events become a prerequisite or dependency on the reactive job setup panel in Robot Schedule. With this addition of file event monitors, Robot Schedule can react to another job, job on another partition, job from Windows/UNIX/Linux, files on IBM i, files on another operating system, or external commands from your programs. If it gets too complicated, you can build yourself a job flow chart with the blueprint feature.

It has been great to see this feature roll out to the market; we received great reviews on this feature at the Fortra Worldwide User Conference this past June. We hope you like it, too, and drop us an email once you start using it.