Accepted, Not Yet Planned

Based on the information provided, this is not a priority for a programmatic fix in the product.

update xpp command update_JT

The command use to update the job ticket update_JT is useful for many purposes, but  as of xpp 9.3.1 it does not update the field in the job ticket sessions saved. 

Our site has thousands of archived documents that it republishes weekly, and most of those old jobs are set to save two or three sessions. Ug. 

We would like to set the sessions field to "none" in the batch environment in order to not have to deal with all the additional page files saved during multi-compose processing. 

Of course, we can convert the job ticket to XML/ASCII , update the field, and convert it back to binary. That will help. 

It would, however, save cycles and be more efficient if we could flash the job ticket with a command line option from update_JT to reset that field in a single step. 

This would simplify our reprocessing of older, archived documents, and any simplification of batch processing is a good thing overall. 

Thanks for considering this enhancement. 

Regards, 

John

John Hoffman
  • in reply to Jonathan Dagresta

    Yes, indeed! Thank you for your suggestion. 

  • in reply to Jonathan Dagresta

    I should have added: So, then, you can do this specific update to the JT in a "single step" and nearly as efficiently as being able to use update_jt.

    Jonathan Dagresta
    SDL XPP Engineering

  • And one more thought, John.

    If all you're needing to do is to update the Sessions Saved field of the JT to "none", you can accomplish that much easier than "round-tripping" the whole JT file (i.e. 'sdedit -aout' followed by 'sdedit -ain') with just an 'sdedit -ain' command with a "fixed" content input file.

    In other words, you can use a -ain file to just update one field, which is especially easy in S/D files that have only one table/rule structure (e.g. the JT or DT).

    So if you create an ASCII file that contains this:

    FILE { type : jt }
    BODY 1:1 {
    archive : none
    }
    END

    Or using the XML format, if the file contains this:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <file xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="jt.xsd"
       type="jt">
    <table>
     <rule key="1">
        <archive>none</archive>
     </rule>
    </table>
    </file>

    You can then just do 'sdedit jt job -ain file' and it will just update the archive (Sessions Saved) field of an existing JT to 'none' w/o affecting any other fields.

    Jonathan Dagresta
    SDL XPP Engineering

  • in reply to Bart Terryn

    Thanks you all for the feedback. 

    A quick note, in the batch environment, in our testing, we are able to output PDF with sessions saved set to "none". 

  • in reply to Bart Terryn

    I'll just chime in with a note that the Session Saved field in the JT means the number of backup session saved, not the total number of sessions saved. The XPP documentation makes that clear. So, "none" means zero backup sessions, not zero sessions. Specifying "1" means 1 backup session, so with that setting you'll normally have two saved sessions total. Obviously, you have to keep around at least one session.  Slight smile

    In the JT, for this field you can currently specify "none" (99), "standard" (0), "all" (-1), and "1" - "3" (1 - 3). In XPP 9.4 you will be able to enter those values as well as "4" - "15" (4 - 15). These are the number of backup sessions that will be saved.

    Don't be "confused" by the fact that internally (in sdedit) "none" is 99 and "standard" is 0 - there's just a historical reason for that (that goes back 30+ years now) and the "session management" code knows how to interpret the values correctly.

    Jonathan Dagresta
    SDL XPP Engineering