Henry,
I believe we're going to develop a Webinar on the subject of running
reliable, unattended scripts. In the mean time, I thought I might address
it directly.
These scripts are actually rather simple in structure...
Sub Script
Do
Reset
Doit
Wait x 'seconds
Loop Until Done
End Sub
Reset is a big Do...Loop with PauseLoop's and At's (or Rules in Rules based
scripting) that gets the app to an "anchor point" from anywhere it might be
from within the app and even starting the app if necessary. It should have
an "ultimate reset" which shuts down everything and starts over. This is
easily accomplished with our BootMgr which, after a period of script
inactivity, will reboot the PC, login, and restart the script.
Doit is the script which, if it has problems, reports them and exits. For
scripts that run continuously, the Done conditional logic isn't necessary.
This strategy is the result of, and has saved us from, a lot of 2AM calls,
and it should work for you.
Rich McNeil
Boston Software Systems
866 653 5105 x813 -or- 508 318 5327
www.bostonworkstation.com
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Henry Hansen
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 5:03 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Talk] How to build a robust script for Meditech --- best
practices? Examples gratefully accepted!
Hello,
Generally speaking, my scripts work OK when conditions are good. It's
when the "edge" cases of Meditech client instability, network link
failures etc., come into play.
I sure would appreciate reading about the strategies successful
scripters use so they can sleep at night and know their scripts are
printing things such as pharmacy MARs reports reliably every evening.
Unfortunately, the network instability is something totally out of my
control - as is the Meditech installation. (We are geographically
about 300 miles away from our data centre hosting the Meditech
servers). Overall, it's pretty good, but we'll see a few Citrix
session drops a week, and a few times per day the 3 Tier Meditech
client's startup/shutdown will take anywhere from .5 seconds to a few
minutes, or completely freeze. Obviously I'd have a lot more hair if
this situation improved ... but I still need to build some type of
error recovery, and this environment seems like a real good place to
perfect error recovery coding.
My strategy so far has been to use a VB6 EXE and the three tier client
for the added Boston Scripting functionality. MeditechCS connection
BTW.
When the time comes to run the report.
Start the Meditech client.
Set a timeut of a couple of minutes.
Save the window handle.
Set an on error goto
Do normal script processing that generally works fairly well.
Call Shutdown and exit.
The error handler looks like this:
-------------
ScriptError:
Logit ("RunMedStan - Error handler: " & Err.Source & " " &
Hex(Err.Number) & " " & Err.Description)
If Err.Number = seDoEvents Then DoEvents: Resume
Call ExitMeditech
Logit ("Error handler finished.")
The ExitMeditech sub looks like this:
Sub ExitMeditech()
Dim I As Integer
If Active Then
Logit ("ExitMeditech: Attempting to shutdown and exit.")
Logit ("ExitMeditech: Sending 4 ESCs - waiting 1 second between
each.")
For I = 1 To 4
Key "{ESC}"
Wait 1#
Next
Logit ("ExitMeditech: Sending 4 ESCs - waiting 0.25 second between
each.")
For I = 1 To 4
Key "{ESC}"
Wait 0.25
Next
Logit ("ExitMeditech - Connecting to non existant stream.")
Connect "fred", stStream ' Close Boston Scripting
Logit ("ExitMeditech - Setting Shutdown=True")
Shutdown = True
Wait 0.5
Logit ("ExitMeditech: Meditech client should be closed.")
Logit ("ExitMeditech: Sending @_UNLOAD")
Key "@_UNLOAD"
Else
Logit ("ExitMeditech: Meditech doesn't appear to be active.")
End If
'
' If the Window is still hanging around.
'
If IsWindow(meditech_hwnd) Then
Logit ("ExitMeditech - hwnd still valid, killing process.")
KillProcess (meditech_hwnd)
End If
End Sub
Thanks,
Henry Hansen @ Palliser Health
