Workload Automation ESP edition, job names longer than 8 characters

[Anon Anon]

In the CA WA Workstation, job names for UNIX jobs are limited to 64 characters, qualifiers are limited to 62 characters.  The documentation in the User Guide states that qualifiers can only be 8 characters, but this doesn't seem true.  I've run jobs with job names at 60 characters and qualifiers of similar length and there did not seem to be any issues.

 

Is that limitation only valid for actual jobs run on the mainframe itself, rather than through an agent on a different server?

 

Are there any consequences to having job names or qualifiers above 8 characters?  Any commands or keywords that don't function properly?  I've seen in the directory that the job will often appear as:

<jobname longer than 8>.<qualifier longer than 8>(<jobname truncated to 8.~0000001).

 

Is that of any significance?

[Lucy Zhang]

Hello Nick,

 

On User's Guide, "Chapter 2: Introduction to CA WA ESP Edition Concepts", it explains as below:

 

 

Naming Your Workload

 

Historically, in ESP the name of a job consisted of up to eight characters and could also include an additional eight characters if you used the job qualifier field. This imposed a limitation of 16 characters for identifying your job. As a result, we had field names and variables representing the job name (maximum eight characters) and the job qualifier (maximum eight characters).

 

In CA WA ESP Edition V5.5, full support for 64-character names was introduced. A new term called full name was created. Full name represents the 1-to-64-character name used to identify the workload.

 

Note: If your existing workload falls within the eight-character.eight-character parameters (name.qualifier) then no further action is needed. The combination of the eight-character job name and the eight-character qualifier is the full name. For all mainframe jobs, the eight-character job name restriction still exists.

 

For example, if your workload is named ABC.123, the job name is ABC, the job qualifier is 123, and the full name is ABC.123.

 

Job name, available in the user interface, reports, and variables, is the shorter of the first eight characters of a full name or the characters before the first period in a full name.

 

In a full name, if there are more than eight characters following an eight-character job name and a period or if there is more than one period in the full name, the qualifier is a system-generated value, for example, ~0000001. So, if full name is DLYUPD.SUMMARY.REPORTS, the qualifier is a system-generated value.

 

For non-mainframe jobs, including all distributed workload, links, and tasks, the name can now be from 1 to 64 characters in length.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Lucy