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Best Practice for Naming OpCon Objects​

Purpose of naming convention

This naming convention is designed to provide you guidelines and best practices about the management of your OpCon environment.

An environment respecting a naming convention with rules is easier to understand and manage for everyone as you can retrieve information efficiently and quickly. On another side, it's also easier for you and for SMA Support to analyse an environment structured around a convention rather than an environment without any rules.

Please keep in mind that it's not mandatory and that you can design your own convention. The following tips are here to provide you a solid base to start your journey with OpCon, to get idea for your own design or to refresh your environment with a predefined framework. This article will also give you which characters it is not recommended to use.

Advantages

  • Environment is easier to maintain and manage
  • It's easier to search for something
  • Troubleshooting is more efficient
  • Anyone can interact with OpCon environment easily

General recommendations

Avoid the use of special characters in names :

  • ( ) Parenthesis
  • ; , . ! Punctuation marks
  • ` Apostrophe
  • ^ Accents
  • Space
  • ? and * are used as wild cards

Avoid using the underscore "_" in the name of schedules and jobs because the underscore is used as a separator mark for:

  • Groups of machines
  • Multi-instance schedules
  • Multi-instance jobs

Schedules

  • You can standardize the name of your schedules by:

  • Type: Schedule SC-, Sub Schedule SS-

  • Environment: Production PR-, Test TST-, ...

  • Service: Marketing MKT-, Stock STK-, Laboratory LAB-, Finance, FIN-, ...

  • Priority: 1 hour 1H-, 1 day 1D-, ...

Jobs

You can apply the same rules as for schedules:

  • Machine type: UNIX-, WIN-, ...
  • RunAgain: UniqueExecution UNQ-, Recurrent job REC-, ...
  • Service: Marketing MKT-, Stock STK-, Laboratory LAB-, Finance, FIN-, ...
  • Tasks: Shell SH-, Batch BAT-, Python PY-, SQL query SQL-, ...

Specific rules for IBM i jobs

  • Names must be 10 characters or less.
  • If a specific name validation lists a different number of maximum characters, the specific rules override this rule.
  • Names must begin with an alphabetic character (A through Z, @, $, and #).
  • All subsequent characters can be alphanumeric (A through Z, 0 through 9, @, $, #, and _ (underscore)).
  • There can be no embedded blanks.

Machines

Machine names in UPPER CASE with a maximum of 20 characters. For WINDOWS or LINUX machines, the name matches the network name of the machine. It can be different but you will have to define in the machine configuration an IP or the FQDN. For SQL machines, indicate the network name of the machine + "-SQL" and complete the fully qualified domain name: PTRXORD01-SQL (with the domain name mydomain.local)

Use of groups of machines to run processes on a set of machines:

  • 20 characters maximum.
  • Prefixed by 3/4 letters corresponding to the type (WIN or UNIX) + dash "-" + n letters corresponding to the application:
    • IBM-BACKUP
    • WIN-PURGE
    • UNIX PURGE
    • WIN-BACKUP

Properties

Managed System Properties start with the character $, the OpCon date variable and the custom name (specify format): For both $SCHEDULE DATE and $DATE we can create a new property with a new name, the purpose is to get a different format than the original one.

$SCHEDULE DATE ddmmyyyy

$DATE yymm

User Global Properties contain only the name (without $), you can also use a prefix for your property name like :

  • Path-
  • Schedule-
  • Job-
  • Login-
  • Password-

Resources/Thresholds

  • A maximum of 20 characters
  • Prefix: R-
  • Then name the Resource in CamelCase

In the documentation field, you can specify:

  • The maximum value of the Resource
  • The context of use of this Resource

T-ThresholdName:

  • A maximum of 20 characters
  • Prefix: T-
  • Then name the Threshold in CamelCase

In the documentation field, you can specify:

  • The initial value of the Threshold
  • The context of use of this Threshold

Tags

Tag name in CamelCase.

To go further...

Don't forget to document your schedules, jobs, properties, etc. to help other users understand what it the purpose of everything and if they need to take particular precautions while working on a specific item.