13.0 Scheduling Jobs

Designer has a job scheduling utility to schedule events, such as setting the system to disable an account on a specific day, or initiating a workflow to request an extension for a person’s access to a corporate resource. You can do the following:

Create a Job object from an installed job definition.
Define when a job is to run, which servers the job is to run on, the scope of the job in terms of eDirectory™ objects, and the job reports for intermediate and final results.
Set values for the job’s parameters, its description, and display name.
Enable or disable a job, manually start a job, stop a job that is running, and display a list of running jobs.

Figure 13-1 High-level view of Job Scheduler process

The Job Scheduler consists of the following principal components:

Job Manager: Identity Manager includes a Job Manager that is responsible for launching scheduled jobs. It runs in the background on each Identity Manager server and checks every minute to see if a job needs to run, based on the job definition. When it encounters one, it runs the appropriate Job Implementation.

Job Object: The Job Object you create in Designer contains all the information necessary to invoke the job. It includes the name, description, schedule, server list, and XML job definition.

Job Definition: The Job Definition is an XML description of all the parameters necessary to perform a specific job, including the Job Implementation used to actually perform the job on the target servers. The Job Definition is an XML attribute associated with the Job Object.

Job Implementation: The Job Implementation is typically a JAR file that contains the java classes that perform the job on the target Identity Manager server. Each server where you want a job to run must have a copy of the Job Implementation file. At the designated time, as specified in the Job Definition, Job Manager runs the Job Implementation to perform the job.