Jobs: Create It Once, and Run It Many Times
ChimneySweep® is built around the notion of a job. A job is a complete, entirely self-contained description of “something you want ChimneySweep to do.” It contains all of the information ChimneySweep needs to complete the entire task, start to finish, with no further input from anyone.
Building jobs with the Job Editor:
The process of building a job is very easy: the “Job Editor” wizard takes you step-by-step through the entire process.
If you like, you can take a step-by-step look at the job-creation process...
What jobs contain:
Jobs may include any or all of the following:
- A list of databases to be processed, and optionally specific tables.
- The exact verification and/or repair options, and other options, that you wish to use.
- Database master-passwords. (These are obscured in the job-file in such a way that they cannot be easily retrieved, even by binary inspection of the file.) You may provide more than one password if needed. ChimneySweep never prompts the user for any database passwords.
- Structure, secondary-password, and referential-integrity information, if the job was built based on a “known good” database.
Running jobs:
Once a job has been defined, it is added to the list of jobs, from which it can be run with just a double-click of the mouse. None of the information needed to build the job is needed by, nor is it available to, the person who will run the job.
Defining jobs with the point-and-click Job Editor:
The process of building a job is easy: a point-and-click “Job Editor” tool leads you through the entire process step-by-step. No specialized product knowledge is required.
The Job Editor is available only in the Traditional and Professional Editions. As the product-name implies, Runtime Edition cannot create or alter jobs; it can only run the jobs prepared by users of one of the other Editions. Nevertheless, all jobs can be run by every Edition, and they run in exactly the same way.
Security features:
You may define a password which must be entered before the user can run a job. (These are of your own choosing, and have nothing to do with table passwords.)
You may also define a separate password which must be entered before the user can edit a job. Furthermore, you may build a “delivered” copy of the job, which cannot be edited by any means.
Full compatibility:
All jobs, once defined, will continue to run without modification in future versions of ChimneySweep. They will, as much as possible, continue to run in the same way as before, which means that if you want to use any advanced features that were only introduced in a later version, you must edit and re-save the job using that later version.
Releases of ChimneySweep through Release 5.1 provide two versions: one uses the 16-bit database engine; the other, 32-bit. Beginning with Release 6.0, 16-bit support was permanently discontinued. Nevertheless, jobs created in any prior release, whether 16- or 32-bit, will run in the current version. (They use only the 32-bit database engine.)
Extras for Professional Edition users:
Professional Edition users may be further interested to know that a ChimneySweep job is, in fact, a complete computer program, written in a built-in interpreted language very similar to Paradox® for Windows' ObjectPAL.™ If you are a Professional Edition licensee, you have full annotated source-code to all of the scripts which build jobs and control their execution in ChimneySweep.
Professional Edition users have access to a few more (and more-advanced) options when defining jobs, simply on the premise that they would have more use for them, and would better understand their possibly-adverse implications.