We have Webi in a Unix environment clustered with multiple BCAs on NT for macro executions. BCA is turned off on Unix but we want to turn it on. Issue is this:
We have a group of users with thousands of reports being converted over to BO. Some may contain macros. We want to default them to schedule their documents in a Unix BCA. However, those documents with macros should get run on an NT BCA. The users are not savvy enough to select which BCA to use within the drop down if we were to have for them one BCA for Unix and one for NT. What would be the best solution?
It is possible within the cluster to have the Unix machine monitor the same BCA that an NT machine could monitor. However, is there a setting that prevents the Unix BCA from trying to run documents with macros so that only the NT will process those?
Currently is not possible to run any VBA macros within Unix environment. There is an an Enhancement Request that has already been requested by many customers (ER 11840: macros or script available in Unix environment to be used in Broadcast Agent Server). I linked your case to it.
Unfortunately, as with all enhancement requests we are unable to give a time frame when the ER is likely to be addressed.
The best solution would be to set up a separate NT server as you already did. Two ideas on how to handle the routing are below. Neither is perfect nor automatic.
I checked, and it is not possible to automate the second suggestion as there is no way in our SDK to figure out whether a job scheduled on BCA contains macro or not.
KB 6918: How do you force a BCA task to run on a specific platform (NT or UNIX)?
[Steve Krandel - text of KB - 6918 removed. Tech support resolutions are not allowed to be copied to BOB. The material is copyrighted]
A picky point, but do you think if your users were presented with a drop down list with two BCA options ‘Use for reports with macros’ and ‘Use for reports without macros’ they’d be able to work it out? I guess the problem with this is they don’t know about the macros in the reports?
(BOB member since 2002-06-11)
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)