The parent-child feature

In some situations, an SAP R/3 job dynamically spawns a number of other jobs; for example, to distribute the workload to the free application servers. Prominent examples are the mass activity jobs of the SAP R/3 FI-CA component. Before BC-XBP 2.0, it was difficult for external schedulers to handle this situation, because the business process does not usually end with the end of the initial job (parent job), but with the end of all subjobs (child jobs).

The BC-XBP 2.0 interface allows you to determine if a job has launched subjobs, together with their names and IDs, and so it is now possible to track them.

To activate this feature, use the INITXBP2 ABAP report, which you can also use to toggle the status of job interception.

When the parent-child feature is active, HCL Workload Automation considers an SAP R/3 job as finished only after all its child jobs have ended. The status of the HCL Workload Automation job remains as EXEC while the parent job or any of its child jobs are running.

The status of the HCL Workload Automation job becomes SUCC if the parent job and all child jobs end successfully. If any of the jobs ended with an error, the status of the HCL Workload Automation job becomes ABEND.

Note: The parent-child feature can interfere with job interception because, although the parent job cannot be intercepted, any of its child jobs can be intercepted if they match the interception criteria. In this case, the HCL Workload Automation job remains in the EXEC status until the intercepted child job has been relaunched and has ended.

The joblogs of the child jobs are appended in the HCL Workload Automation stdlist after the joblog of the parent job.