Procedures

Attune’s Procedures allow you to perform operations and execute commands across a number of different machines, running under Windows and Linux operating systems. Scripts written in Bash, Perl, Python PHP, and Windows Powershell can all be run on a number of different machines while being still being held centrally in Attune for consistency and ease of maintenance.

Attune’s Procedures also make use of Variables in scripts, which can have different values mapped to them prior to the job. This facilitates the creation of procedures that are generic and re-usable. You can deploy the same script across different machines to achieve different results by mapping different values to the variables in the procedures prior to the job.

The left pane shows a list of procedures that have already been created. There are buttons at the top to –

• Create a New Procedure
• Import a Procedure into Attune from a file (.atp file)

The middle pane shows the currently selected procedure and the procedures that are contained in it. Group steps have a ‘+’ to their left. Click to expand and view procedures contained in the group step There are buttons at the top to –

• Add a new procedure into the currently selected procedure
• Link an existing procedure into the currently selected procedure as a step
• Export a Procedure to an .atp file

The right hand pane shows details of the current procedure or sub-procedure selected.

• details shown will vary depending on the type of procedure selected
• procedures that execute programs or scripts will have an editor window at the bottom, allowing you to view and edit the file.

Creating a Procedure

To create a Procedure, click on the ‘Create’ button at the top left of the screen, and the following dialog will appear on the right. Enter a name in the ‘Step Name’ field to identify your new procedure. You can add more descriptive text in the ‘Comments’ box at the bottom.

There is a checkbox called ‘IsProcedure’ which is checked by default – indicating you are creating a ‘Group Step’ procedure. If you uncheck this box, a ‘type’ box appears at the top of the dialog, allowing you to specify the type of procedure you wish to create.

If you select a different type of procedure the screen will change to allow you to add details specifically required by the different procedure types.

Some of the procedures – the ones that execute scripts or commands, feature a script area where your scripts or programs can be created and edited with Attune’s built-in text editor.

When you have added the required information in the spaces provided, click on the ‘Create’ button at the bottom of the screen to save your procedure.

When you create a new procedure the default type is ‘Group Step’ because most procedures are made up of a series of other procedures, or groups of procedures, which you can create, or add to a procedure by using the ‘Add’ and ‘Link’ Buttons at the top of the screen.

Editing a Procedure

Select a procedure to edit from the list in the left-hand pane. The middle pane will show the structure of the procedure, and the Group steps and procedures that are contained in the procedure.

If you click on any of the Procedure steps, the details of that procedure will be shown in the right-hand pane for editing.

At the bottom of the right hand pane there are three buttons

• Save – save changes you have made to the procedure
• Reset – undo any changes made since the last save
• Unlink – remove a procedure out of the currently selected procedure. The procedure will not be deleted, just taken out of the current procedure.

If you forget to click on save before moving to another procedure, your changes will be lost. The buttons are at the bottom of the screen, and you will often have to scroll down to see them.

When you edit a procedure that is a step or a group step inside the main procedure, there will be two fields at the top of the right-hand pane – link name and link order

If you specify a link name for the procedure step, the procedure name will be renamed as link name(procedure name) in the tree hierarchy diagram. This allows you to give more meaningful and descriptive names to the procedure steps, especially where you are using a procedure step a number of times in a procedure. You can give a procedure step different link names when you use it in different parts of your procedure so you can easily differentiate between the different instances of the procedure step.

The link name does not group procedure steps together, or affect their order of the job. You can remove the link name from a procedure step and the procedure name will appear without the link name, but will otherwise not be affected by the removal of the link name.

Link order is a number that specifies the order in which steps in a procedure are executed. When you create a step in a procedure or link in a pre-defined procedure as a step, the step is given a default link order value indicating its position in the procedure. If you alter this link order number so that it is less than the link order number of the preceding step, the position of the two steps and their job order will be reversed.

This allows you to change the job order of steps within a procedure if required.

Deleting a Procedure

You cannot delete a procedure from the ‘procedures’ screen in Attune – you will need to use Attune’s step maintenance function. This provides better facilities for showing how procedures are linked together and dependency relationships between procedures.

Deleting a procedure that is used as a step in another procedure will cause problems. To delete a procedure, you will first need to unlink it from all other procedures.

Click on ‘Maintenance’ on the menu along the top of the screen, and select ‘Steps’ from the drop-down menu. The Steps screen will appear

If you select one of the procedures from the list on the left, the details of that step will be displayed on the right.

If you click on the ‘unlink’ button, a dialog box will appear asking you to confirm that you wish to unlink the procedures. If you select ‘ok’ the procedure will be unlinked and this will be permanent – you do no need to click the ‘Save’ button at the bottom of the screen. If you want to restore the link you will need to go to the ‘Procedures’ section to manually link the procedures again.

If you have unlinked the current procedure from all other procedures, a red ‘Delete’ button will appear at the bottom next to the ‘Save’ and ‘Reset’ buttons. If you click on this button the current procedure will be deleted. You can unlink the current procedure from all other procedures but still, keep it as a saved procedure if you wish.

Importing a Procedure

Procedures can be imported into Attune. If you have an Attune procedure file – with a .atp extension you can import the procedure into Attune by clicking on the ‘Import’ button at the top left of the screen. A dialog will appear with a highlighted area where you can drag and drop your procedure file into

Exporting a Procedure

Attune procedures can be exported to a file, which will have a .atp extension. You can also include values used by your procedure, and archives if your procedure has any ‘Deploy Archive’ steps. Select the procedure you wish to export from the list on the left-hand side, and click on the ‘Export’ Button.

A Dialog will appear

If there are any archives specified in any ‘Deploy Archive’ procedures, they will be listed. Click to check any Archives you want to include with your exported procedure.

If you click on the Values tab you will see a list of values that are currently mapped, in a Plan, to the variables used in your procedure. Click to check any Values you want to include with your exported procedure.