Activity properties

When you have outlined your basic design by adding activities and triggers to the diagram window, you fill in the details by editing the properties of the activities.

To edit an activity, do one of the following:

Double-click the activity in the Diagram window.
Select the activity and choose Properties... from the shortcut menu.
Select the activity and choose Edit ► Properties.

The format of the Properties dialog box depends on the type of activity. All have a General page, however, and any activities with output triggers have a Triggers page.

The General page contains:

Name. The name of the activity, you can edit the name here if required.
Description. An optional description of the activity.
Logging text. The text that will be written to the Director log when this activity is about to run.

The Triggers page contains:

Name. The name of the output trigger.
Expression Type. The type of expression attached to the trigger. Choose a type from the drop-down list (see "Triggers" for an explanation of the different types).
Expression. The expression associated with the trigger. For most predefined conditions, this is fixed and you cannot edit it. For Custom conditions you can enter an expression (see "Expressions"), and for UserStatus conditions you can enter a text message.

You can use variables when defining trigger expressions for Custom and ReturnValue conditional triggers. The rules are given in the following table:

Table 1. Variables used in defining trigger expressions
Activity Type	Variable	Use
Job	`stage_label`.$ExitStatus `stage_label`.$UserStatus `stage_label`.$JobName	Value of job completion status Value of job's user status Name of job actually run, including invocation id, if present.
ExecCommand	`stage_label`.$ReturnValue `stage_label`.$CommandName `stage_label`.$CommandOutput	Command status Name of command executed (including path name if one was specified) Output captured by executing the command
Routine	`stage_label`.$ReturnValue `stage_label`.$RoutineName	Value of routine's return code Name of routine called
Wait-for-File	`stage_label`.$ReturnValue	Value returned by DSWaitForFile before/after subroutine
Exception Handler (these are available for use in the sequence of activities the stage initiates, not the stage itself)	`stage_label`.$ErrSource. `stage_label`.$ErrNumber. `stage_label`.$ErrMessage.	The stage label of the activity stage that raised the exception (for example, the job activity stage calling a job that failed to run). Indicates the reason the Exception Handler activity was invoked, and is one of: 1. Activity ran a job but it aborted, and there was no specific handler set up. -1. Job failed to run for some reason. The text of the message that will be logged as a warning when the exception is raised.

stage_label is name of the activity stage as given in the Diagram window. You can also use the job parameters from the job sequence itself.

Custom conditional triggers in Nested condition and Sequencer activities can use any of the variable in the above table used by the activities connected to them.

The specific pages for particular activities are described in the following sections.