1

Does somebody know the difference between the ODATE and the RDATE? The manual says:

ODATE --> Original scheduling date of the job.

RDATE --> Installation current working date.

But that is not helpful for me.

Thanks a lot.

Isaac
  • 11
  • 1
  • 3

1 Answers1

2

The ODATE is when the job is scheduled for originally and you need to take into account 2 things; i) when is your New Day Processing (i.e. if it's 06:00 am each day then the ODATE runs from 6am-6am and will be the same for that whole period) ii) you don't necessarily have to order with the date set as the current date - e.g. today you might want to order in jobs where some are scheduled for the last day of the month due to batch processing considerations.

%%$RDATE or %%RDATE (one value gives the year as yyyy, the other as yy) will resolve to the current system date. Whatever your server is saying the local date is now, regardless of Control-M settings, the RDATE will give you that. Often this setting is used if your job could run on different days but you really need to have today's date in the processing.

Of course, if your New Day Processing runs at midnight, you always clear all jobs away during NDP and you never order jobs into the future - then RDATE and ODATE will be basically the same.

Mark
  • 316
  • 1
  • 5
  • Thanks for your answer, Mark. Then, what will be the difference between RDATE and DATE? Aren't the same? Could you please give me an example for RDATE usage? Thanks! – Isaac Jul 14 '21 at 07:01
  • The manual says RDATE is the "installation current working date" and DATE is the "current system date" - which sounds like they are the same thing. It is possible that DATE is provided by the Control-M Server and RDATE comes from another component. The best way to test would be to create a command line cyclic job that runs every 20 minutes or so and which echoes out DATE RDATE ODATE and so on. The output through 24 hours would show you the differences (if any) between the way the values are resolved. – Mark Jul 15 '21 at 19:41
  • I use RDATE for shout messages (in post-processing) where I want to give the date as the error occurred. – Mark Jul 15 '21 at 19:47