Graphical Designer overview

The Graphical Designer presents drag and drop functionalities that enable you to add elements from a palette to a canvas workspace.

To open the Graphical Designer from the Dynamic Workload Console, open the Design menu and click Graphical Designer.

Graphical Designer essentials

The Graphical Designer interface is composed of two main elements:

Workspace: The workspace is the canvas on which you can place, design and connect your job streams.; When selecting the Graphical Designer, the My workspaces page opens, from which you can create new workspaces, and edit or delete the existing ones. For more information, see Managing your workspaces.
Palette: In the palette you can find everything you need to create and deploy functioning job streams.; Placed on the left side of a workspace, the palette is divided in two tabs, Blocks and Assets, from which you can manage items, as well as add them to the canvas to create new job streams. For more information, see Using the palette.

Controlling jobs and job streams processing

To control the processing of jobs and job streams in your environment, you can add triggers, dependencies, and constraints.

Triggers

You can associate three types of triggers to a job stream:

Service: You can link a service to a job stream, and publish the service on the Self-Service Catalog.
Run cycle: A run cycle specifies the days and times when a job stream is scheduled to run.
Excluding run cycle: An excluding run cycle specifies the days and times when a job stream must not run. Excluding run cycles take precedence over run cycles.

To add a trigger to your job stream, click the Add triggers button in the job stream box in the workspace, then click Add new and select the trigger from the drop-down menu. Then, specify the required information in the property panel.

Dependencies

You can create internal or external dependencies between job streams or jobs in your workspace.

Job streams and jobs are represented visually as rectangular blocks in the workspace, each featuring four connection points. To establish dependencies between these blocks, drag connecting arrows from one block's connection point to another. Arrows are visually represented differently depending on whether the dependency is internal or external:

Internal dependencies are represented by a single arrowhead
External dependencies are represented by a double arrowhead

When you create an internal dependency, a panel where you can specify dependency information appears, and you can eventually change the dependency type from internal to external.

Join conditions

To establish a set of dependencies between job streams or jobs, you can define a join condition. This condition specifies that a job stream or job must wait for the join condition to be met before it can start running. The join condition is satisfied only when one or more dependencies have been satisfied.

You can drag a join condition from the Blocks tab and drop it in a job stream or in a job. Then, connect the join condition block to the items that must be part of that join condition. In the properties panel, specify a name for the join condition and optionally define the minimum number of predecessor dependencies required to satisfy it. If you do not specify a value, all predecessor dependencies must be satisfied.

Constraints

To control the job or job stream processing, you can add the following constraints:

Prompt
Resource
File
Internetwork dependency

Click the Add constraints button on the job or job stream box in the workspace, then click Add new and select the type of constraint from the drop-down menu. Then, specify the required information in the property panel.

For more information about dependencies, see Using dependencies to control job and job stream processing.

Saving and exporting

The items you defined in a workspace can be saved to the database by selecting Deploy.

Note: After the successful deployment of a workspace, you are prompted to decide whether you want to delete it or not. Deleting a deployed workspace clears the canvas, and all the items previously defined in the workspace are safely saved to the database and can be used in future workspaces.

You can export workspaces as JSON files or upload previously exported workspaces to keep working on them. You can also save the workspace visuals as Portable Network Graphics (PNG) files.

Note: If you close the Graphical Designer page before deploying a workspace, you can continue to edit your job streams when you log in again, but changes are not saved in the database until you complete the deployment.