Use control tasks

Control tasks are actions that you can perform on middleware or middleware resources. For example, checking the connection to a host is a control task. When you trigger a control task, Deploy starts a task that executes the steps associated with the control task.

View control task in the GUI

To view a list of control task in the GUI:

1. Click Monitoring.
2. Click Control Tasks.

note

By default, Monitoring only shows the tasks that are assigned to you. To see all tasks, click All tasks.

Trigger a control task from the GUI

To trigger a control task on a configuration item (CI) in the GUI:

1. In the top navigation bar, click Explorer.
2. Locate the CI on which you want to trigger a control task. Click to see the control tasks that are available.
3. Select the control task to trigger it.

note

Some control tasks will require you to provide values for parameters before Deploy executes the task.

Trigger a control task from the CLI

You can execute control tasks from the Deploy command-line interface (CLI). You can find the control tasks that are available in the CI reference documentation for each plugin. For example, the glassfish.StandaloneServer CI includes a start control task that starts a GlassFish server. To execute it:

deployit> server = repository.read('Infrastructure/demoHost/demoServer')
deployit> deployit.executeControlTask('start', server)

Some control tasks include parameters that you can set. For example:

deployit> server = repository.read('Infrastructure/demoHost/demoServer')
deployit> control = deployit.prepareControlTask(server, 'methodWithParams')
deployit> control.parameters.values['paramA'] = 'value'
deployit> taskId = deployit.createControlTask(control)
deployit> deployit.startTaskAndWait(taskId)

Add a control task to an existing CI type

To add a control task to an existing CI type such as Host, you can extend the Generic plugin as follows:

1. Define a custom container that extends the generic container. The custom container should define the control task and the associated script to run. The script is a FreeMarker template that is rendered, copied to the target host, and executed. For example, in synthetic.xml:

   <type type="mycompany.ConnectionTest" extends="generic.Container">
       <!-- inherited hidden -->
       <property name="startProcessScript" default="mycompany/connectiontest/start" hidden="true"/>
       <property name="stopProcessScript" default="mycompany/connectiontest/stop" hidden="true"/>
       <!-- control tasks -->
       <method name="start" description="Start some process"/>
       <method name="stop" description="Stop some process"/>
   </type>
2. In the Deploy Library, create the container under the host that you want to test.
3. Execute the control task.

Create a custom control task

For information on writing your own Deploy control task, see Create a custom control task.