ViewPoint Manual

Customizing ViewPoint
ViewPoint Manual—426801-001
6-16
Adding TACL Macros and Routines
again, the primary and alternate event displays configured to monitor events begin
displaying events as they occur; any events previously stored in the events cache are
lost. You get the best performance by setting the RECOVER-CACHE parameter to
False.
True means that all events previously contained in the event cache are retrieved. When
ViewPoint is started again, the primary and alternate event displays begin displaying
events starting with the the oldest event contained in the cache before the shutdown.
Adding TACL Macros and Routines
If your ViewPoint application provides a TACL interface, the operator can use the
TACL screen to run programs, including TACL macros and routines. Using TACL and
the Define Process feature, you can write macros and routines for the operator to start
from the TACL screen.
Define Process allows you to define many background requesters that continue running
so you can pass commands to them and control the output. This allows faster response
time because, for many commands, a majority of the time spent executing the command
is spent starting up the process.
Using a single interactive process to perform a command on a large number of objects—
for instance, to start a large number of terminals or data-communications lines—can be
time-consuming, since a single process operates on only one object at a time. Using the
Define Process feature, you can write a TACL macro or routine that defines many
instances of a subsystem management process such as SCF; sends commands to each
process for different objects; and waits for any one or all of the commands to finish,
taking full advantage of the multiprocessing environment of the Compaq system. Your
macro or routine can send commands from a file or a variable and queue the commands
up for various processes. It can display the resulting output, delete it, or save it in a file
or variable.
In addition, you can write a macro, routine, or obey file to set up background
processes—that is, start tasks to be done automatically while the operator is using other
ViewPoint features, such as the various status and event-message screens. Background
tasks performed by such a routine could include starting and stopping measurements
using the Measure performance measurement tool, generating reports periodically with
the Enform query language, and running regular batch jobs at specified times. For
information on the Define Process features that permit setting up background processes,
refer to Section 4, “Process Definition Commands.”
Example 6-4 illustrates three simple TACL macros. The first TACL macro starts
background PATHCOM, CMI, and DNSCOM processes. The second lists status
information from each. The third stops the background processes.