Introduction
For customers who use the Job Administration DLL to launch and manage broadcasts, an interface is provided to treat a job as 'open' and directly launch individual items by making a call to the DLL for each one. This avoids the overhead of provisioning a job for bureau clients who submit single items.
Provisioning
A new, unused, job instance can be designated as an open job by calling Job Action 50 or using the right-click menu item in JOBADMIN. The number of items to be handled in each open job must be specified at this time. The job is subject to the following restrictions and special features:
•The $fs_template items for $fax_phone, $voice_phone, $email_address, $sms_phone, $poll_phone are removed by job action 50 and are specified as each item is launched.
•Only a single Open Job is supported at each Owner/Jobtype level. Job Action 50 can automatically close an existing Open Job at the specified level.
•The 'broadcast type' of the job instance is ignored, because it will be inferred from the type of destination specified in the LaunchItem operation.
•The variable V7JCF is ignored and only $jcf can be used for the job control list file.
•Launching individual e-mail and SMS items into an FS MSMQ is not currently supported.
•Any $listfile commands present will be removed from the Job Instance UJP.
•The following $job_options parameters are ignored: NoProofDoc, PreConvert, WordMerge, Dedupe, CreateBCXvars.
•If a UJP command is present which adds a transmission element, such as $job_document and $cover_sheet, or if the UJP contains $fs_template commands such as $sms_body and $email_subject, the command will affect each job item launch unless overridden in the LaunchItem operation.
•A limit must be set in advance for the number of items to be launched individually in the job. This allows a sequential batch of FS numbers to be pre-allocated to the job. The number must not exceed 200,000.
The job action function will set the job to be an open job (status 50) and will allocate the FS number batch for the job. Open jobs can be suspended (set to status 52) and resumed in the normal way, which will prevent pending items being transmitted but will not prevent further items being launched.
Launching Items
For each item to be launched a customer application would normally make a call to the Job Administration DLL job action function LaunchItem with parameters:
| parm1 | The job instance UJP pathname |
| parm2 | A string containing a sequence of UJP commands, separated in a DLL call by CRLF, or as specified in the LaunchItem topic for scripting. Each command must be formatted as it would normally be in the instance UJP and overrides the UJP content for the item. For details of the use of each command see the LaunchItem topic. |
| parm3 | not used |
The function returns either the FS number allocated for the item or a launch error code. This will be the sequential FS number even if the ReverseFS job option has been used to reverse the digits of the FS filename. A call to launch an item will be rejected when the number of items specified for the open job has been reached.
It is important to check the result code of an item launch, because if the launch fails, by definition an FS file will not have been created. However checks such as do-not-send matches will result in an FS file with FORCE_FAIL in the usual way.
Job Completion
The customer application must call a Job Action 51 function to end processing of the job. or use the JOBADMIN right-click menu for the job instance. Only the first parameter is required. The call will update the $jcf command in the job instance UJP to reflect the number of items used. The job status is then set to 80 (completed). There is currently no means of automatically re-activating a closed open job, so Job Action 51 should not be used while FS files remain to be sent.
Using JOBADMIN
A newly created job can be converted into an Open Job using a right-click menu item, and an Open Job can be closed in the same way. A right-click menu item also allows occasional LaunchItem operations to be performed, but Items but launching items in an Open Job would normally be done by Job Administration API calls as described above, or by using scripting to do this. Items in an open job can be viewed on the Item Status tab,
