Job conditional dependencies key concepts and restrictions

Consider the following key concepts when using conditional dependencies:

• You cannot have mixed combinations of AND and OR operators within the same condition, but you can define more than one conditional dependency on a single operation and link them using dummy operations.
• Because internal and external dependencies are managed differently in HCL Workload Automation for Z, it is important to know that conditional dependencies are considered to be external dependencies, even if they link operations belonging to the same application occurrence in the plan. This means that:
  • Because all operations belonging to the same application must be chained using normal dependencies, in some cases it might be necessary to provide a common normal predecessor or successor to the conditional predecessor and conditional successor operations to join the operations together. For more information, see How to ensure application consistency using FOP.
  • Within the same application you cannot define an operation both as conditional predecessor and as a normal predecessor for a specific operation.
  • When adding an occurrence to the plan, set Dependency Resolution to YES to add conditions even if they involve only internal predecessors. To set the Dependency Resolution to YES when the condition addition is the result of a match in the ETT criteria, you must set the value in the DR column to Y in the definition of the ETT Tracking Criteria.
• You cannot change the status of an operation, out of rerun path, if you have a condition on it which is not True. This is because a condition whose status is not T (True) is equivalent to an external predecessor that is not C (Completed).
• You cannot change the status of an operation, out of Rerun path, if you have a conditional successor in status C, X, E, or S. This is because you cannot have a successor that is already processed, successfully or not.