Batch Process

Defines a repeatable sequence of steps which achieve a specific information processing objective in Grooper.

Remarks

A Batch Process is a sequence of individual Batch Process Step objects, each specifying an Activity to be applied. Activities may represent automated system tasks, or human-attended tasks which require operator interaction. Collectively, these steps represent a workflow process through which batches of a particular class will travel.

Once created and published, Batch Processes are assigned to production batches at batch creation time.

Publishing

Batch Processes must be "published" before they are available for production use. This can be done using the "Publish" button on the Batch Process - General tab. Publishing places a read-only copy of the Batch Process into the 'Batch Processing / Processes / Published' folder, making it available for production use.

Once a Batch Process has been published, all new batches will use the current published version. When changes are made to a Batch Process and a new version is published, the changes will apply to new batches, but will not impact existing batches already in progress. To apply the latest published version of a Batch Process to an existing batch, pause the batch and use the Batch - Update Process command.

To unpublish a previously-published Batch Process, making it unavailable for production processing, use the "Unpublish" button on the Batch Process - General tab.

Flow Control

By default, the steps in a Batch Process execute sequentially, in the order in which they are defined. In cases where customization of the execution order is necessary, there are two mechanism which allow this to be achieved.

First, each Batch Process Step object provides a "Next Step Expression" and a "Should Execute Expression", which allow the execution logic to be customized using simple one-line VB expressions, similar to a formula in Microsoft Excel. This is the best option and the easiest to implement in cases where the flow control logic is simple.

Secondly, Batch Process objects are scriptable. This means that a "Scripting" tab shows up on Batch Process objects in Grooper Design Studio, allowing scripts to be created, edited, and debugged in Visual Studio. (See Grooper Node - Scripting for more information.) The scripting interface for Batch Process objects raises a BatchCompleting event, which can be used to intercept the batch completion event and redirect the batch to a step other than the next step in the sequence.

Inherits from: Grooper Node

Properties

The following 5 properties are defined.

Commands

	Command Name	Shortcut Keys	Description
	Add Multiple Items		Creates multiple items as children of the selected object.
	Clear Children		Deletes all children of the selected object(s).
	Export to Zip Archive		Exports a set of Grooper nodes to a ZIP archive.
	Publish to Grooper Repository		Publishes one or more Nodes to one or more Target Grooper Repositories.
	Unpublish		Unpublishes a set of Grooper Nodes to a Target Grooper Repository.

Tabs

See Also

Content Type, Project

Used By

Batch Statistics, Control Sheet, Data Capture Automation, Data Review Operators, Embedded Extractor, Keystrokes, Scan Operator Efficiency, Scan Volume