This past weekend, I spent a bit of time doing some additional work around the task broker. Since the release in Nov. , I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from folks that are doing all kinds of interesting things in tasks. And I’ll be honest, many of these task processes are things that I could never, ever, imagine. These processes have often times, tripped the broker — which evaluates each task prior to running, to determine if the task actually needs to be run, or not. So, I spent a lot of time this weekend with a number of very specific examples, and working on update the task broker to, in reality, identify the outliers, and let them through. This may mean running a few additional cycles that are going to return zero results, but I think that it makes more sense for the broker to pass items through with these edge cases, rather than attempting to accommodate every case (also, some of these cases would be really hard to accommodate). Additionally, within the task broker, I’ve updated the process so that it no long just looks at the task to decide how to process the file. Additionally, the tool is reading the file to process, and based on file size, auto scaling the buffer of records processed on each pass. This way, smaller files are processed closer to 1 record at a time, while larger files are buffered in record groups of 1500.
Anyway, there were a number of changes make this weekend, the full list is below:
- Enhancement: Task Broker — added additional preprocessing functions to improve processing (specifically, NOT elements in the Replace task, updates to the Edit Field)
- Enhancement: Task Broker — updated the process that selects the by record or by file approach to utilize file size in selecting the record buffer to process.
- Enhancement: New Option — added an option to offer preview mode if the file is too large.
- Enhancement: Results Window — added an option to turn on word wrapping within the window.
- Enhancement: Main Window — More content allowed to be added to the most recent programs run list
- ** Added a shortcut (CTRL+P) to immediately open the Recent Programs List
- Bug Fix: Constant Data Elements — if the source file isn’t present, and error is thrown rather than automatically generating a new file. This has been corrected.
- Update: Task Debugger — Updated the task debugger to make stepping through tasks easier.
- Bug Fix: Task Processor — commented tasks were sometimes running — this has been corrected in both the MarcEditor and console program.
- Enhancement: Status Messages been added to many of the batch edit functions in the MarcEditor to provide more user feedback.
- Enhancement: Added check so that if you use “X” in places where the tool allows for field select with “x” or “*”, the selection is case insensitive (that has not been the default, though it’s worked that way in MarcEdit 6 but this was technically not a supported format
- Updated Installer: .NET Requirements set to 4.6 as the minimum. This was done because there are a few problems when running only against 4.5.
–tr