Creating and extending the production plan

The entire process of moving from an old to a new production plan, including its activation across the HCL Workload Automation network, is managed by the JnextPlan script. You can run JnextPlan at any time during the processing day. The new production plan that is generated is immediately activated on the target workstations regardless of the time set in the startOfDay variable. When the JnextPlan command is run, the $MANAGER variable is managed as follows:
  • The variable is resolved if the workstation is a fault-tolerant agent of a version earlier than 8.6.
  • The variable is left unresolved for fault-tolerant agent workstations version 8.6.

When you run the JnextPlan script, the workstation processes are stopped and restarted on all the workstations across the HCL Workload Automation network. For more information about workstation processes, see Understanding basic processes and commands.

The JnextPlan script can be run only from the master domain manager. It uses the default connection parameters defined in either the localopts or useropts files (see Setting up options for using the user interfaces). If you want to run JnextPlan using different connection parameter settings, you can edit the MakePlan script and modify the invocation to the planman statement as described in Planman command line.

The JnextPlan script is composed of the following sequence of commands and specialized scripts, each managing a specific aspect of the production plan generation:
conman startappserver
This command is invoked to start WebSphere Application Server Liberty Base if it is not already running.
MakePlan
This script inherits the flags and the values assigned to them from JnextPlan. Its syntax is:

MakePlan [-from mm/dd/[yy]yy[hh[:]mm[tz | timezone tzname]]] {-to mm?dd?[yy]yy[hh[:]mm[tz | timezone tzname]] | -for [h]hh[:]mm [-days n] | -days n}

MakePlan invokes internally the planman command line. MakePlan performs the following actions:
  1. Creates a new plan or extends the current plan and stores the information in an intermediate production plan containing:
    • All the scheduling objects (jobs, job streams, calendars, prompts, resources, workstations, domains, files, users, dependencies) defined in the selected time period.
    • All dependencies between new instances of jobs and job streams and the jobs and job streams existing in the previous production plan.
    • All bind requests whose scheduled time is included in the selected time period.
  2. Deletes all bind requests in final state.
  3. Prints preproduction reports.
SwitchPlan
This script invokes internally the stageman command. For more information refer to The stageman command. SwitchPlan performs the following actions:
  1. Stops HCL Workload Automation processes.
  2. Generates the new Symphony file starting from the intermediate production plan created by MakePlan.
  3. Archives the old plan file with the current date and time in the schedlog directory.
  4. Creates a copy of the Symphony file to distribute to the workstations.
  5. Restarts HCL Workload Automation processes which distribute the copy of the Symphony file to the workstation targets for running the jobs in plan.
Note: Make sure no conman start command is run while the production plan is been processed.
CreatePostReports
This script prints postproduction reports.
UpdateStats
This script invokes internally the logman command. For more information refer to The logman command. UpdateStats performs the following actions:
  1. Logs job statistics.
  2. Checks the policies and if necessary extends the preproduction plan.
  3. Updates the preproduction plan reporting the job stream instance states.

For more information about how to use the JnextPlan script, see JnextPlan.

Note: Every time you extend the production plan, its run number increases by one. When the run number exceeds 32000, jobs submitted on dynamic agents remain in intro status indefinitely. To solve this problem, perform the steps described in Reset run number to 0.