Delaying a task from running while another task is running

[kevinpintokpa]

In our Publisher environment, we have many complex dependencies, many of which are managed by Task Triggers.  However, there is one scenario I am having trouble with:

Task A executes once every hour during normal business hours and creates TaskA.QVD.  This hourly QVD update is necessary for some dashboards, scheduled to run in Chain A.

TaskA.qvd is also consumed by many other dashboards in a long independent chain of tasks, Chain B.  This chain executes on a daily basis and should NOT execute hourly.

I am seeing failures where Task A executes while TaskA.qvd is being held open for reading by a task in Chain B, which could be one of Task X, Y or Z.  

I need some way to tell Publisher:  Delay executing Task X, Y or Z while Task A is running.

Ideas?

[Chip_Matejowsky]

Hello @kevinpintokpa ,

You can utilize the Supporting Tasks in the QMC to create a Pause task and trigger it to be executed by completion of Task A and in turn, trigger subsequent tasks of the completion on the Pause task.

See QMC > System > Supporting Tasks > Pause

[kevinpintokpa]

Hi Chip,

I'm not sure how this would work for my case.  Perhaps I am missing something:

Task A runs every hour from 9 am to 6 pm.  It triggers Task P (the pause task)

Task P is scheduled to delay until 6 pm?

Task P executes at 6 pm and triggers Tasks X, Y and Z.

While this could work, it will result in Tasks X, Y and Z being delayed until 6 pm.  My users would rather have their dashboards updated in the morning, otherwise they will be using stale data.

Thoughts?

[Chip_Matejowsky]

I think it would depend upon how long it takes tasks X, Y, & Z to complete. Can all three complete within 45 minutes or so? If yes, you can set the Pause task to 30s or 60s to allow for the QVD creation task to complete and save to disk, etc. Then start task chain with task X > Z. Otherwise, you'll need to rethink your task schedule to accommodate the QVD creation task along with the other 3 tasks in the chain, within 1 hour.

[Brett_Bleess]

I think the correct answer on this one is a Dependency condition on Task X, Y and Z that relates to all Chain A tasks having completed.  I believe this should do what you want, the only other idea would potentially be an On Multiple Event task for X, Y and Z where you set the multiple tasks needing to be complete within the time window in order for X , Y and Z to trigger.  This should be doable, but without further details, this is about the best I have, hope it gives you some further ideas here. 

Regards,
Brett