Re: [Condor-users] wishlist for notification messages

[David McBride <dwm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 21 May 2005, Derek Wright wrote:


>the only potential snag is if
>people already are parsing the emails, they'll scream about changing
>the format.  all you pesky users make our job so much harder... ;)

May I suggest that you leave the current human-readable text intact, and
instead add the various bits of metadata to the headers of the email
itself?

You want to be able to put simple key-value pairs in, so why not do
something like:
	X-Condor-JobID: 32478
	X-Condor-SubmitHost: foobar.localdomain.com
	X-Condor-Command: /bin/uname
	X-Condor-CommandlineArgs: -a

...etc.  In this way, anyone currently parsing the human readable output
doesn't get broken and a regular user will only see the normal
human-readable output -- however, anyone interested in parsing detailed
key/value pairs about the status of the message can do so easily.

As well as using a seperate header for each main statistic, you could
just dump the entire ClassAd description of the finished job into a
single header -- that would allow a script to extract whatever
detailed information about the job it likes.

Just an idea.

Cheers,
David
-- 
David McBride <dwm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London

Excellent day for putting Slinkies on an escalator.