Automating System Date Change

[dbowman@capri.ca]

Does anyone automate their TAM system date change and if yes, can you share how to do this?

Deb Bowman
Capri Insurance Services Ltd.
Kelowna BC - Canada
197 TAM users
TAM2013

[Mark]

Hi Deb,

We don't have any kind of automation, it's just the first person who signs into TAM in the morning that has permissions to change the date changes it.  Not sure if there is a way to automate or not.  We recently game more employees the ability to change it and have not had any problems with that.

[Jeff Zylstra]

Hi Deb,

We don't have any kind of automation, it's just the first person who signs into TAM in the morning that has permissions to change the date changes it.  Not sure if there is a way to automate or not.  We recently game more employees the ability to change it and have not had any problems with that.

Agreed.  I don't think there IS a way to automagically change the date.  I wish there was a way, and I wish there was a way to do this for night utilities as well.  Night utilities especially, should run as a service on Windows that is always running until cancelled, and not an executable that needs to be manually launched each time.  JMO.

[Mark]

Night utilities especially, should run as a service on Windows that is always running until cancelled, and not an executable that needs to be manually launched each time.  JMO.

Hans has a great method of automating NU, however I do not believe this can be done to automate the date change.

[Billy Welsh]

Agreed.  I don't think there IS a way to automagically change the date.  I wish there was a way, and I wish there was a way to do this for night utilities as well.  Night utilities especially, should run as a service on Windows that is always running until cancelled, and not an executable that needs to be manually launched each time.  JMO.

I do NOT miss NU.  Still running once a week on my TAM data while I finish cleaning up, but I am looking forward to the final good-bye.

[Hans Manhave]

Currently I have a scheduled task that runs a teeny batch file for scan & reindex.

I store it on my C: drive named it "tam_reindex.bat"

It contains the following:

G:
cd\wintam
dbmaint /C:NIGHT /O:R /O:SF /F:ALL
CD\
C:

G: being the TAM drive letter, C: the local workstation.  I don't recall what /c:night does.  Using the /? indicator will get you dbmaint switches and their use.  I have it running every night at 4:45am.  Not had a problem with reindexing since then. 

I also use Workspace Macro Pro 6.5 from www.tethyssolutions.com.  I use it for flagging agency bill items.  I have lists of item numbers in a spreadsheet, it just hops down the list looking up each number in the reconciliation and flagging it, repeats as many times as I tell it beforehand.  I do some other things with it too, but those have been frowned upon so I won't spread that.

I have not tried to automate date changes as we like to change the date ourselves. 

While thinking about this, I do believe this is possible using Workspace Macro Pro and Excel.  WSM could open up an Excel sheet, an Excel function could contain the current date plus 1 and that could probably be copied into the login procedure for TAM just as I copy and paste for flaggin agency bill items.  The WSM sequence could be scheduled at a certain time.  There could be many other ways, not involving Excel.  This one seemed simple enough.

I hope this helps.

[Jeff Zylstra]

Very interesting, I will have to check into the Night Utilities and see what those options are, and what exactly it is doing.  I don't think that you're doing download from night utilities, are you Hans?  That's something that I would have to make sure got done each night as we depend on downloads.  Conan do you know anything about this?

[Hans Manhave]

I have done download by schedule using the Workspace Macro Pro 6.5 features!  It is just that in TAM 10.8 which I am still using at this moment, the download process crashes.  It crashes doing it manually every day.  I could work with that in the macro, especially since it would have a bunch of time at night to schedule something like this, but I never felt the need.  We are not really a retail agency depending on downloads as much as a regular retail agency would be.  pdfFactoryPro and Workspace Macro Pro is a great combination to automate.  pdfFactory saves the created files in its temp directory so even if there were a power failure, MS caused reboot after updates etc. no reporting would be lost.  I used to have it waiting for me to arrive in the morning.  I would save the whole job.  Then I would delete the job parts or pages that I didn't need, e-mail the result, undelete all and delete some other pages and e-mail that set to someone else etc.  Great way to automate, I think.

[Jeff Zylstra]

I love PDFactory.  I think Paul Dodson turned me on to that many years ago.  Has anyone heard from Paul?

[Conan_Ward]

Very interesting, I will have to check into the Night Utilities and see what those options are, and what exactly it is doing.  I don't think that you're doing download from night utilities, are you Hans?  That's something that I would have to make sure got done each night as we depend on downloads.  Conan do you know anything about this?

Generally speaking, we don't have any real option for automation of NU afaik.

as for the commands, C:Night is telling dbmaint to run as night utilities, o:r is reindex, O:sf is scan and fix f:all is files, all. If you run dbmaint with an invalid switch it pops up the list of valid switches in case someone wants to take a closer look at whats there.

On autochanging the date, I've got nothing. The way tam stores that information would make it difficult/near impossible to do.

[Hans Manhave]

Very interesting, I will have to check into the Night Utilities and see what those options are, and what exactly it is doing.  I don't think that you're doing download from night utilities, are you Hans?  That's something that I would have to make sure got done each night as we depend on downloads.  Conan do you know anything about this?

Generally speaking, we don't have any real option for automation of NU afaik.

as for the commands, C:Night is telling dbmaint to run as night utilities, o:r is reindex, O:sf is scan and fix f:all is files, all. If you run dbmaint with an invalid switch it pops up the list of valid switches in case someone wants to take a closer look at whats there.

On autochanging the date, I've got nothing. The way tam stores that information would make it difficult/near impossible to do.

A challenge... in case I find myself bored and at the office this weekend. 

[Mark]

Generally speaking, we don't have any real option for automation of NU afaik.

This is what drove me to find Workspace Macro about 6 - 7 (8?) years ago or whatever it was to automate the launching of NU.  I then made it a paperless process and have each "printed" report emailed to the proper person.

Would have been nice to have a command line switch to just schedule and fire off, but I can see why this hasn't been implemented due to the printing which may be involved, reports, etc.

The process I came up with works very well for us, though.  I know Hans took it and altered it to work for his environment, and I don't know if Nick still uses it, but I know he ported it to an agency or two a while back as well.

[Conan_Ward]

Very interesting, I will have to check into the Night Utilities and see what those options are, and what exactly it is doing.  I don't think that you're doing download from night utilities, are you Hans?  That's something that I would have to make sure got done each night as we depend on downloads.  Conan do you know anything about this?

Generally speaking, we don't have any real option for automation of NU afaik.

as for the commands, C:Night is telling dbmaint to run as night utilities, o:r is reindex, O:sf is scan and fix f:all is files, all. If you run dbmaint with an invalid switch it pops up the list of valid switches in case someone wants to take a closer look at whats there.

On autochanging the date, I've got nothing. The way tam stores that information would make it difficult/near impossible to do.

A challenge... in case I find myself bored and at the office this weekend. 

As best put by XKCD https://xkcd.com/1319/

[Hans Manhave]

That's when we wish for the 'good ol' days'. 

[Mark]

haha, that can be pretty accurate at times.  Which is why I seldom try to write code!