External not being marked complete in ESP

[Anon Anon]

Recently, I have been receiving a lot of after hour calls about externals holding up production jobs. In every case, the base job has been force completed but the external does not complete. Our operators are using Workstation to complete the job. I believe that in all of the cases the base job is being completed before it runs. I absolutely cannot figure out why the external is just hanging around. Any ideas or what I can take a look at?

Thanks for any help.

Sherri 

[Jonathan Calloway]

Sherri,

 

We had been having the same problem.  There is a hot fix out there that addresses this issue.  We applied it a few weeks ago.  We see this mainly during month end, and so far things have gone very well this week.

 

Lucy Zhang helped us with this.  She may want you to open a case in order to get the hotfix.

 

 

[Anon Anon]

Thank you Jonathan!

We are currently upgrading to 11.4. I wonder if that will fix our issue? Or is this a workstation issue?

Sherri

[Jonathan Calloway]

I'm sure it's not a workstation issue.  We upgraded to 11.4 last summer and were seeing it after that. 

 

Lucy is active in the community.  Perhaps she will chime in.   The fix we applied was a dev/test fix; it may be in a new RO by now, or may be soon.

[Lucy Zhang]

Thank you, Jonathan for your active involvement.

 

Your issue was a bit different, related to bypassing the home job and the external won't be bypassed. It's addressed by a known defect:

EXTERNAL JOB WITH SCOPE IS NOT BYPASSED                                                                                                                        

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION:                                                           

The external job with SCOPE parameter remains in EXTNL status and will not be  

bypassed if remote application is created after the real job is bypassed.      

The fix correctly bypasses the external job with SCOPE parameter when the      

remote application is created after the real job is bypassed.                  

 

The fix is still in QA. If any one is interested, please open a support ticket for it.

 

Lucy

[Petr Vacula]

Sherri, the expected behaviour might be affected by USERMOD 30. Check if by any chance this USERMOD is active. Kind regards, Petr

 

USERMOD 30
When USERMOD 30 is active, it disables functionality introduced with CA WA ESP
Edition release 5.1 for users who rely on the previous behavior.
If USERMOD 30 is not active, the job is forced complete in the remote application. This
happens whether the job has actually been submitted or not.
If USERMOD 30 is active, the job is forced complete in the remote application only if it
has actually been submitted (that is, the JES internal reader successfully processed the
remote application). This was the default behavior of CA WA ESP Edition prior to release
5.1.

[powdo03]

Sherri,

I agree with Petr that USERMOD 30 is probably what is causing the behavior. We have clients that use ESP with USERMOD 30 turned on or off.

 

My 2 cents.

It can be beneficial to use ESP so that externals are not completed. Then it is easier to complete applications without the concern that other schedules may start running. I see this as a large risk. Where I worked we periodically completed applications and retriggered them. It would have been very difficult to track down every  external.

 

It does require some training of the Operations staff to filter on the job and then force complete both the external and home job.

 

2¢

[Anon Anon]

Thank you for everyone's help! We are using USERMOD 30. Sounds like it is working as designed and we will have to decide if we want to continue to use it.

Sherri