User Guide > UserInterface > Activity Window > Activity Window

Activity Window

The Activity Window informs you about a client's tasks which have either been activated manually or by a superordinate task. It displays the current status of a task beginning with its activation and start until the transfer of its report.

The Activity Window is one of the UserInterface's main components, along with the Explorer and the Message Window.

You can use several Activity Windows and filters within a UserInterface. In doing so, you can group tasks of the same name, status, or host on which they run in a single window.

Click the button or use the Activities... command in the View menu, and a window opens where you can specify filters for the Activity Window. By default, no filter is set, and all activities are displayed. Use the tabs in order to specify filters for various areas. Then click OK and the Activity Window opens. The status bar displays your specified filter settings.

The administrator can limit the number of activities that should be displayed in the Activity Window using the variable UC_SYSTEM_SETTINGS. If the specified value is exceeded, a message appears in the Activity Window's status line. Automic recommends setting filters in the Activity Window selection for this case so that tasks are arranged in groups and tasks that are currently not displayed can be viewed as well.

The Activity Window is split into two sections:

The left-hand field is used to filter the tasks displayed in the right-hand field.
A grouping criterion can be selected using the grouping combo box, where the Queue, Agents and Status options are selected by default. If executable objects are allocated to User-defined Grouping Criteria, these will also be listed in the combo box.
Regardless of this selection, all Client Queue objects, all client agents, all status groups including individual status, and potentially all values of the user-defined grouping criterion will be listed in the same field. If you click an entry in this list (for example, on the name of a queue or an agent), only the corresponding activities will be displayed in the right-hand pane.
If you are not filtering a queue, the activities window automatically switches to the List view.
For the queues and agents listed in the left-hand pane, a context menu is available containing a number of different commands (queue start / stop, statistics, etc.).
The tasks are displayed line by line in the right-hand pane of the window. Various tasks are listed, regardless of the filtering in the left-hand pane.
The task list contains several columns that contain a range of information. Simply click the column heading to sort the list. Click again to change the order of the list (ascending or descending). You can also change the order of the columns by clicking and holding the mouse button while you move the column.

Column	Description
Name	The object name or the alias name (if available) of the activated task.
Type	The object type of the activated task.
Description	The Period description of the recurring execution you may have defined by using the Execute Recurring function of an executable object.
RunID	The run number of the task. Comments are available in tasks in which the RunID has a small red border.
Parent	The run number of the parent task that activated this task.
Status	The condition symbol and status of the activated task.
Status within Parent	The condition of any task inside its parent, i.e. a job inside a workflow.
Platform	The symbol and name of the platform on which the task is being processed.
Queue	The Queue object for the task.
User	The user who has activated this task.
Start Time	The time when the task was started.
Priority	The priority that was used to execute the task.
Host Name	The name of the agent that executes the task.
User ID	The login data to the computer on which the task is processed.
Start Type	The start type of the activated task.
Process ID	Identifier for the process on the OS level during execution.
CPU Time (sec)	The consumed CPU time in seconds.
Archive 1 Archive 2	The object's first and second archive key.
Consumption	The object's resource consumption (can be specified in the Attributes tab).
Runtime	The time that has passed since the task started.
End time	The point in time when the task ended.
Modification flag	In workflows that have been modified during their runtime, this column includes a pencil symbol and the name of the user who made the last modifications.
Remote Status	This shows the status that an SAP or RA job has in its application. This column is empty if no status is available. For example: An SAP job. AE status: "Active", status in the SAP system: "Released" (this appears in the "Remote Status" column).

The Activity Window's content is refreshed on a regular basis. The corresponding interval can be determined in the settings of the UserInterface. Pressing the F5 key immediately refreshes the content.

Various functions such as statistics of tasks are available via the context menu.

Use the shortcut CTRL + F to open the quick-search function in the Activity Window.

In the Activity Window, the context menu shows the additional item "Workflow" for tasks running in a workflow. This menu item contains all the commands that can also be called in the Workflow Monitor. The following commands are available:

Go Immediately
Set Breakpoint
Delete Breakpoint
Skip Task
Unskip Task
Unblock Task

Use the shift key to highlight a specific range of objects. Keep the CTRL key pressed in order to select objects that are not directly positioned above or below each other. You can also right-click the mouse in order to work within a highlighted range. Only menu commands that can be used with all the highlighted objects are available.

Activity Window Views

The Activity Window can be displayed in two different views.

List view
Hierarchical view

The first view displays all the tasks in list form as the following illustration shows:

The List view becomes unclear when a lot of tasks are displayed. Therefore, the Activity Window defaults to the Hierarchical view. This view groups tasks that have a common main task (parent).

Main tasks (parents) can be:

Workflows
Schedule objects
Groups
SAP jobs and sub-jobs
Wildcard file transfers
Escalating notifications

The Hierarchical view not only structures the information, it also reduces the server's workload.

The Hierarchical view groups subordinate tasks and also several restart runs of the same task. The last restarted run represents the main node. When this is expanded, all the previous restart runs are listed.

Expanding a parent task in the hierarchical view will list its direct subordinate tasks. If this list includes a sub-workflow, you must also expand it in order to see its child tasks. Note that collapsing or expanding workflows does not automatically refresh the view. For this purpose, you can use the Refresh command in the Activity Window.

To switch views, click the button.

In the hierarchical Activity Window, the selection criteria only affect first-level parents.

Ended tasks of Schedule objects that have not yet been deactivated after a period turnaround are handled as first-level tasks and not as scheduled tasks in the Activity Window. This is because the Schedule object obtains a new RunID with each period turnaround and is no longer the parent of these tasks.

Also see:

Activities Window Selection
Context Menu of the Activity Window
Updating UserInterface Windows