General Handling

Job Preparation Menu





An UNICOREpro job is constructed as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of tasks and sub-jobs which may contain other tasks and sub-jobs. All these actions are available from the Job Preparation menu. Because only (sub-)jobs can contain tasks you have to define a (sub-)job first before a task can be added.

The top level job has to be created by selecting New Job in the File menu or even more convenient by selecting the button of the Job Preparation tool bar. All included (sub)-jobs are added from the Job Preparation menu or from a context menu which will open by a right mouse click if you have selected a (sub-)job or task in the job tree.

The Job Preparation menu lists the tasks from which a job can be constructed. There are three group of tasks:

Job Tree

Jobs in prepartion are shown in the upper of the two tree panels marked Job Preparation. You can resize the display area by dragging the separators.



Clicking on the handles near the job symbols expand or collapse parts of the tree. Clicking on either a job, a sub-job or a task switches the main panel on the right to show the corresponding context.

The analog functionality is offered in the Job Monitor to view the status information of your jobs.

Copy, Cut, and Paste

(Sub-)Jobs or Tasks

To copy, cut, and paste a (Sub-)Job or a Task when preparing a job, click on the handle in the job tree. Select the action either from the context menu which will open by a right mouse click. The standard short cuts Ctrl-c, Ctrl-x, Ctrl-v from Java applications or Windows will also produce the required behaviour. Paste will insert the action below the handle which you have currently selected in the job tree.

The names of copied actions will be extended by the suffix "_copy".

Text

A lot of information has to be entered in text fields when preparing a job. To copy, cut, or paste text entries use Ctrl-c, Ctrl-x, Ctrl-v.

Sorting Sub-Jobs and Tasks

With cut and paste it is possible to specify the order of sub-jobs and tasks in the job tree. Even more convenient, your job will be sorted automatically when pressing the "Sort" button in the Job Preparation tool bar. The automatic sort honors existing dependency chains.

Removing jobs

To remove a job or parts of it click on the related handle in the Job Preparation tree. Then select the `Remove' action either from the context menu which will open by a right mouse click, or from the Job Preparation menu. A third alternative is to select the button.

Several jobs or parts may be removed in one action by marking them as usual, i.e. either individually by using the Ctrl-key or as a block by using the Shift-key.

Offline mode

If your local Client system is connected to the Internet the Client will try to contact all Vsites to update its database of available resources. This will produce a lot of time-out errors when the Client is not connected to the Internet. To avoid the corresponding loss of Client performance it is possible to select an offline mode. No connections to the Internet will be started, and the latest available information about the resources of the Vsites will be taken from a cache file.

WYSIWYG

When preparing a job you will enter text or press buttons, select files, etc. in several panels. The client user interface implements the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach which means that all the modified values are put automatically into the internal job representation when a major input panel (e.g. a task panel) is left (including modifications in sub panels).