Auto Man - Design Philosophy

Design Philosophy

The philosophy behind the idea of this range of products is that a user should never have to implement more software than they actually need at any given time, but be free to upgrade to more comprehensive implementations when their processing needs require it. AutoMan implements the high level programming language, so that users can make automated decisions at any step of the process. The GAL implementation in AutoMan allows the user to insert high level language interpreted code into exit points in the operating systems process. AutoMan enables jobs and tasks to be dispatched according to simple or complex date and time relationships. As an example, days and dates may be named, and the dispatch scheduled in relation to named date. Thus if a task is needed at 9 A.M. on the day after the American Independence Day, first American Independence day Holiday is defined as the 4th of July, except when it falls on a weekend, in which case it could be the 3rd or 5 July, then the dispatch event is defined as "at 9:00 on the first day after the holiday".

While there are a number of software products that provide either job scheduling or event automation services, it is distinguished by three services that are not provided by any other software implementation. These are as follows:

• the ability to go back in time, before the program was started and make decisions based on previous events.
• creation of new commands, and re-interpretation and modification of existing commands.
• real time monitoring and scanning of printed output data files. This last while very useful in monitoring and reacting to log files, particularly for z/OS web services, is arguably a very dangerous capability.

As a result of the fact that the same automation language is used to describe user processing for all events and schedules, the text of output can be altered, after it has been written by an application, and before it is printed at the output device. Although this function is most often used to send email or pager alerts when certain texts are detected in the logging files, there is a danger that unscrupulous or dishonest users can use it to alter the text of reports after they have been produced.