GP Agent Batch Wildcarding

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GP Agent Batch Wildcarding

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When scheduling a task such as Posting, GP Agent lets you use “wildcarding” to select which batches you want to post.  The wildcarding may not be what you’re used to if you use wildcard characters to search for files on your computer, where you can use “*” or “?” to substitute for any character in the file name.  Instead, GP Agent uses the SQL Server “like” operator to allow you to specify a pattern to be used for selecting batches, where the percent sign (“%”) represents any set of multiple characters, the underscore “_” represents any single character and square brackets ([]) are used to represent multiple character substitutions.

Please refer to the SQL Server documentation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179859.aspx) for detailed options to use with the “like” operator, but here are a few examples:

To specify batches that all begin with a specific letter or letters (in this case ‘SOP’), you would use the following pattern: SOP%

To specify batches that end with ‘2010’, you would use the following pattern: %2010

To specify batches that have ‘2010’ any where in the batch number, whether it is the beginning, middle or end, you would use the following pattern: %2010%

To specify batches that have begin ‘SOP’ or ‘POP’, you would use the following pattern: [SP]OP%

To specify batches that have ‘B’ through ‘G’ as their first character followed any single character, followed by ‘TRX’ and then some numbers,  you would use the following pattern: [B-G]_TRX%.  This type of pattern would select all BMTRX, CMTRX, FATRX and GLTRX batches.

Wildcarding is available only in the latest builds of GP Agent 10.0 and 2010.  If you do not see this option on your window, update to the latest build.