Tweaking Schedulers in xMII

SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII) Business Logic Services includes its own scheduling service that allows you to execute transactions on different schedules.

• The Schedule Editor is used to set up all scheduled jobs.
• The Scheduler is used to view a schedule summary.

Schedulers can be used to perform the functions as defined by SAP but we can also use it to have a variety of other things.

Like when me and my teammate Rupesh were discussing about an MES simulation for a training demo, we were struck with the brilliant idea(;-)) of using scheduler to update the SQL table and display the values in LED. Now the LEDs(of the Grid) will be updated from a SQL table which is updated by a transaction.

What did we achieve

We achieved a grid which was somewhat like this.

The grid automatically changes according to the values in the SQL table. And yippie... we did simulated MES.

This is just a tweak that one can use to simulate some time bound action. I hope this also gives readers the idea to get the things done using schedulers. This is just for prototypes and shoudl not be used on real production environments.

What did we do?

• We created a table called stage_info using MySQL for simulating the stage activities. It has two columns:
• o LineID(alphanumeric)
• o Stage_ID (alphanumeric)
• o Stage_status(boolean)

• Another table line_info is created for holding the flag that whether the transaction is to be executed or not.
• o Line_id(alphanemric)
• o RunFlag(Boolean)

Here for the sake of simplicity, I'm using a Boolean value for stage_status(1 for in use and 0 for idle).

• We created a transaction which fulfils the following functionality.
• o First it will check the status of the flag for current line. If it is true then it will execute the rest of the transaction otherwise it will exit it.
• o reads the sql table and check the status of each stage and change the status of next stage and current stage.
• Then a scheduler is set to run for specific time interval and the transaction for this scheduler is set to the transaction that we created earlier.
• We created a columnlights grid with source as the field of the stage_status of stage_info table. Here we set the color context as
• o 1-Green
• o 0-Magenta

The refresh rate of the grid was set to 15 seconds.