For me, Olav gets the big door prize for brevity, speed of execution, maintainability, and just sheer elegance. 

(The only possibly unique but inelegant solution to anything that I can ever recall is the Gosper Gun, which troubles me philosophically. There ought to be an elegant solution, dammit).

Riffing on Stan’s ‘sneaky approach’, my general stance is that if I want to do something in a jobstream, then why wouldn’t I do it in that jobstream? To which the answer is the same in CI programming as in any other programming language; I want to extract a block of common, possibly complex, code into a single subroutine I can call from many different places, know it is the same each time, and can maintain it in just one place.

Presumably, this is what Reggie has done*; his code is in a command file, all his jobstreams execute this command file, and the too-large IF construct is intended to filter these for some payload applicable only to certain jobstreams.

So amending Stan’s idea slightly, if you know there are a bunch of things your jobstream is and isn’t going to want to do in that command file, you set a little block of global vars at the start of the jobstream (glob_rerun, yes; glob_abort_proc, no; glob_log, yes; - that sort of thing) and then the command file can test for these variables instead of a whole list of jobnames, and cover all sorts of common jobstream tasks, each for only the applicable jobstreams.

A little more maintainable and scalable, perhaps, with vars instead of companion confíg files.

This does still require upfront planning though; and when you think of a new common task, it is much easier to put it in the command file with an Olav-style IF POS than to extend possibly tens of existing jobstreams with a new glob_var :-)

*Reggie, I am aware we have concentrated on solving your problem rather than asking why you have it in the first place; would you care to enlighten us on the circumstances in which it comes about, which might not be the same as what I have conjectured above?



Sent from my iPad

> On 26 May 2019, at 02:47, Stan Sieler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Roy and Olav had some clever solutions.
> 
> Another possibility is:
> 
> setvar match false
> 
> IF HPJOBNAME="M06266" OR HPJOBNAME="M03024" OR HPJOBNAME="M10620" then
>  setvar match true
> 
> elseif HPJOBNAME="T94211" OR HPJOBNAME="M12813" OR HPJOBNAME="M11359" then
>  setvar match true
> 
> elseif HPJOBNAME="M17057" OR HPJOBNAME="M14878" OR HPJOBNAME="M51207" then
>  setvar match true
> 
> ...
> endif
> 
> if match then
>  ...
> 
> A sneaky approach is:
> 
>  setvar match false
>  if finfo (hpjobname, "exists") then
>     xeq !hpjobname
>       # some files, like M17057, exist that have one line:   setvar match
> true
>       # thus, we rely on that *external* file to tell us if we want to do
> whatever it is.
>  endif
> 
> With that kind of approach, you can setup a jobname related file to
> configure various things,
> and at the start of your jobs:
> 
>    if finfo ("!hpjobname.config", "exists") then
>       xeq !["!hpjobname.config"]
>  endif
> (You might have to experiment with the syntax of the expression after
> 'xeq', I'm not
> a CI programming expert, and I didn't test it, either.)
> 
> Stan
> 
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