Action rules Syntax

General Syntax

<rule_name>(<List of comma-separated parameters>)

Optional and mandatory parameters

Parameters may be mandatory or optional. They are separated by commas.

Optional parameters are described in square brackets [<parameter name>].

You leave the parameter empty when you wish to omit an optional parameter in an action rule.

Parameter specification

Each parameter of an action rule can be specified in a rule-specific way.

In some cases, the value of a parameter contains characters that are also used as separators (like comma, semicolon). In these cases, the value can be specified as [<value>].

note

If files can be specified as input, then this can also be files relative to a process definition, a document, or even file on the server.

• Syntax for addressing files.

Rule input

Input to the rule can be specified by either a parameter which contains the location of an input file, or implicitly by a rule result of a rule which was executed before the actual rule (see multiple rules using concatenation).

Usually an input file refers to a result of a process run in SAP. The result of a process is an application log or spool output.

Some of the rules allow to select these output files from the current but also other processes. Therefore this selection of the input is called Output Selection.

In the Rules, the parameter name <Output Selection> will be used globally.

A list of several input files are separated by semicolon.

Syntax

<Criteria>[[;<Criteria>]

• <Criteria> - [<Target Filename>=]<Source Filename>.
• [<Target Filename>] - Specifies the target file name like "stdout.log". In case the source file is defined generically, the target name is used as a prefix separated by _.
• <Source FileName> - The syntax to address source files is described in the section above. Default for Source FileName is step1_spool1.txt.

Rule output

There are usually two possible rule outputs: return code and merge record.

A return code is basically an error code. In general a return code of 0 means no error occurred. A return code not equal to zero leads to a process to reach status Error, unless the return code is handled with action handlers which can set process status individually.

A merge record is comparable to a comma separated value list. It represents a table like list where lines are separated by a line separator and values within a line are separated by comma.

Results in form of a merge record are available either in the parameter RULE_RESULT of a process or as input to the next rule (see multiple rules using concatenation).

• RULE_RESULT - Merge record containing result list.

Multiple rules using concatenation

You separate multiple rules using semi-colons.

The output of a rule is a merge record (see above). This is used in memory as input to the next rule.

The output of a sequence of rules is the output of the last rule. The return code and merge record of the last rule can be evaluated.

If a rule requires parameters that also contains a semicolon, then a rule can be enclosed by square brackets to indicate where the rule starts and ends as a processing unit.

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