Understanding carry forward options

Job streams are carried forward when the production plan is generated. How the job stream is carried forward depends on:

  • The carryforward keyword in the job stream. See carryforward.
  • The enCarryForward global option. See HCL Workload Automation Administration Guide.
  • The stageman -carryforward command-line keyword. See The stageman command.
  • The carryStates global option. See HCL Workload Automation Administration Guide.

If a job is running when the production plan is generated, and the job stream that contains it is not carried forward, the job continues to run and is placed in a dedicated job stream called USERJOBS in the new production plan.

Carry forward global options settings shows how the carry forward global options work together.
Table 1. Carry forward global options settings
Global options Carry forward operation
enCarryForward=all carryStates=() Job streams are carried forward only if they did not complete. All jobs are carried forward with the job streams. This is the default setting.
enCarryForward=no No job streams are carried forward. If this option is set to no, running jobs are moved to the USERJOBS job stream.
enCarryForward=yes carryStates=(states) Job streams are carried forward only if they have both jobs in the specified states and the carryforward keyword set in the job stream definition. Only the jobs in the specified states are carried forward with the job streams.
enCarryForward=yes carryStates=() Job streams are carried forward only if they did not complete and have the carryforward keyword set in the job stream definition. All jobs are carried forward with the job streams.
enCarryForward=all carryStates=(states) Job streams are carried forward only if they have jobs in the specified states. Only jobs in the specified states are carried forward with the job streams.
Resulting carry forward settings shows the result of the carry forward setting based on how the enCarryForward global option and the stageman -carryforward keywords are set.
Table 2. Resulting carry forward settings
enCarryForward stageman -carryforward Resulting carry forward setting
NO YES NO
NO ALL NO
YES NO NO
ALL NO NO
ALL YES ALL
YES ALL ALL
YES YES YES
The carry forward option set in the job stream definition is persistent. This means that an unsuccessful job stream that is marked as carryforward, continues to be carried forward until one of the following occurs:
  • It ends in a SUCC state
  • Its UNTIL time is reached
  • It is cancelled.
Note: Regardless of how carry forward options are set, job streams that do not contain jobs are not carried forward.

If you set carryStates=(succ) and either enCarryForward=all or enCarryForward=yes, then the next time you run JnextPlan there will be misalignment between the preproduction plan and the new Symphony file. This happens because, the preproduction plan does not contain the instances of job streams that ended successfully, but the new Symphony file does. The result of this misalignment is that dependencies are not resolved according to carried forward successful job stream instances because they no longer exist in the preproduction plan.

The decision to carry forward a repetitive job, that is a job that contains an every time setting in its definition, or a chain of rerun jobs is based on the state of its most recent run. Only the first job and the last job of the chain are carried forward.