"On Event" chores

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Alan Kirk
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"On Event" chores

Post by Alan Kirk »

This idea is based on a question that was asked by poster yyi.

Lotsaram correctly made the point that unless some compelling reasons can be given, the idea would never get off the ground. So have at it; would chores which are automatically run when certain events occur (like server startup) be useful to you? Indeed, would similar "event" chores like Before_Save, After_Save or Before_Shutdown chore be useful?

(After_Save, for example, could be used to automatically trigger a backup of the data directory.)

One way I'd use an "After_Startup" chore would be to do a check through all of my daily or weekly scheduled chores to determine when they last ran. (We store that information in a control cube.) If any had been missed while the server was down, the startup chore would handle running them to ensure that all of the cubes had been updated.

Other ideas / needs / desires?
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Re: "On Event" chores

Post by hbell »

This may be getting too complicated ... but an "on change" event could be useful in a number of scenarios:

1. It would allow "semi real time" cube updates via TI in situations where true live links/feeders etc are too heavy
2. It would allow "conditional linking" (ie: feed this value to cube X if y parameters are met)
3. It might open the door to allow validation of inputs if it could trap pre- and post-commit
4. It would allow an automatic "Security Refresh" on tailored views of the "{" security cubes

The 3rd one might be further reinforced by an "on update" event if that allowed user input behaviour to be "steered" in some way (eg: you can't complete this cell until another cell is valid)...

hugh
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Re: "On Event" chores

Post by blackhawk »

This is what we refer to as triggers.

We have been asking for this for years. Haven't really seen much traction on getting it into the release schedule.

:cry:
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Re: "On Event" chores

Post by Michel Zijlema »

Hi,

PALO has a module called Supervision Server which is in fact enabling you to set triggers on a number of events, a.o. OnUserLogin (you can use this f.i. for LDAP authentication), OnUserLogout, on cell value change, OnDatabaseSaved and OnServerShutdown. You can define a cell value change trigger on a cube area. This could f.i. be used for input validation, direct calculation of derived values or for audit trail (logging). Within PALO this is all PHP-based, so all event handlers are PHP scripts.

It would indeed be nice if comparable functionality would be available in TM1.

Michel
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Re: "On Event" chores

Post by Steve Rowe »

I'd certainly add my vote to this, it would greatly expand the functionality available to the developer. It would certainly make all the VBA I have to write to build budgetting tools much lighter.

I have definitely heard triggers mentioned at a TM1 Roadmap presentation in the UK, probably 2 years ago now, can't realy remember if this was pre or post Cognos.
Is this something that has dropped off current Roadmap presentations?
Is it something the Cognos front-end has?

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Re: "On Event" chores

Post by MSidat »

Came across this thread on a search for something else completely but thought of a potential compelling reason.

We currently have a series of TI's in our live environment that we utilise when we need to set up a new Development or UAT Environment i.e. we take a copy of Live, postfix UAT/Dev onto the end of the server name in the config and launch it as a service on the same server or elsewhere, and as soon as it comes back up we run the TI's which in essence turns it into a Development or UAT Server by ensuring all users (except Admin) are either deleted or their password is changed, parameters in our own control cube is updated so all exports from chores and process are redirected to the UAT/Dev environment.

Obviously we know how long it takes to come up so we can take an educated guess to when we have to be at our desk to login and kick off the processes or set up a scheduled task to kick off the RunTM1.exe to run the processes. But it would be a lot more efficient if these TI's could be kicked off straight away as soon as the server is live.
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Re: "On Event" chores

Post by David Usherwood »

I'd like this too - but I can suggest a workround.
Write a process/chore which runs every 10 minutes.
a Check whether a flag in a key cube is set
b If not, do the initialisation you need
c Then set the flag

This is how I process 240,000 model points through a model which will not run up fully in our 512gig server :lol: . But it does take around 50 hours to complete.
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Re: "On Event" chores

Post by Alan Kirk »

I was just reading through this thread and a thought occurred to me... one place where these events would be seriously useful would be "After Dimension Update". Imagine having a chore that triggered automatically to rebuild subsets which might otherwise be constructed by MDX (such as "all N Level"). You'd get as close as possible to a dynamic subset without the overhead of real time calculation.

Of course first IBM would need to be convinced of the need for something like this over that of new icons.

Still, 10.1 does at least include the long overdue StartupChores option (well done for that one at least, IBM) so perhaps they're nudging just that smallest bit closer to implementing trigger-like chores.
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