Disable a task so that it cannot be resumed or restarted

[unay]

Hi team,

Do you have any functionality in Qlik Replicate or AEM to disable few tasks or a particular task when an issue occurs at the source to prevent the data corruption at the target so that it cannot be resumed or restarted manually.

Please suggest.

Thank you,

Pranathi

[Heinvandenheuvel]

There is no task level enable/disable setting in Replicate or it's UI. Therefor if a user is allowed to connect to the replicate server, and has Replicate operator privs then that user can start/resume the task.

If your operator(s) only have access through the Enterprise Manager, then I believe you can change the protection for a task to move it out of their control. I've never bothered to set this up myself but the manual indicates "In the tab for a specific task, click the task permissions icon in the task toolbar.
The User Permissions for task: {task name} window opens." - that sounds like it will offer per-task control.

Personally I think it is a people management problem but I can see you'd worry that a well intended operator sees a task is stopped and wants to 'help' by just starting without research nor consulting some control board you might have.

Maybe the safest thing to do is to temporarily remove the source endpoint from the task. That's non-destructive, you can just add it back. Replicate will give the warning "Any tables, table selection patterns, table settings or table filters defined for this source will not be deleted". You can even drop a dummy endpoint in the with a name like "Temporarily Disabled - check with Unay". If all you do is save, later remove and restore the real source and save again then everything will be as it was. Still... I'd definitely  make a date-time stamped export for such task when playing games like that.

Hein.

[john_wang]

Hello @unay ,

Besides @Heinvandenheuvel excellent explanation, I'd like to add another option: control the runtime operations (such as start, stop, or reload task) via user permissions. However this is only available while Replicate GUI server running on Windows as  all users will have the admin role while Replicate Server running on Linux.

Hope this helps.

John.

[john_wang]

Hello @unay ,

How about change the source endpoint database password in Replicate endpoint (or other parameters of the connection string to prevent it from work)?

Regards,

John.

[unay]

Hi John Wang and Hein,

Thank you for your reply.

Like you recommended, we can always include a dummy endpoint or remove the source endpoint or play with user permissions so that task won't run. However when we are out of the data corruption situation, it is not easy to retain the task definitions to the original state.  This could be the case with any task in any server.

Another question - Is there any user error in Replicate UI or AEM UI we can throw when they try to resume the task/resume the task based on the timestamp saying, task is not allowed to be run or can we not overwrite the native functionality of Resume/Resume based on the time stamp in Qlik Replicate/Qlik AEM.

Thank you !

[Heinvandenheuvel]

>> Is there any user error in Replicate UI or AEM UI we can throw when they try to resume the task/resume the task based on the timestamp saying, task is not allowed to be run

I don't think so. The thread of a  baseball bat may be the best tool as this is more a people/operations management issue. You could try to use technology. For example you could agree that tasks may NEVER be started through the UI but always need to be started through a script 'for additional auditing'. Such script could  use the AEM Rest API or even just REPCTL to do the action after checking an enable flag and text, possibly reporting 'task can not started as of xxxx, please contact yyyy'

Hein.