We recently upgraded to Windows 7 and installed VC 6.1.9. Our executables that we used to run in background work, but we can no longer see the jobs behind them unless we run them in foreground. We don't like to keep the server logged in all the time just so we can see these jobs. It worked great in XP...if we needed to see why a job wasn't completed, we'd just log into our Windows 7 user and see what the problem was. Now, they are invisible. The task we are running is Execute and it's a batch file to launch the app.

In an Execute Script task, we run a VBS script and that fails right away in background. The error is btnRunJob was called...not found. If I cut and paste the filepath and log into Windows 7 with the same user id and run it, it works fine.

Hi,

the reason for this is security. Since Vista, they are forced to run in the background, and if pushed to desktop you will see the "Interactive services" screen. It is actually a good thing security wise because it prevents anyone aborting the process and gain high level access to the server.

What you need to do is to configure your scripts to write to output and let VisualCron capture that information. Then you will see the reason why etc. from VisualCron instead.

I guess you do not see this now because the way you launch the exe but if you use the Execute Task and use the full path to the batch file it should be captured by VisualCron.

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Thanks for your response. That's disappointing, because we're often launching a script that calls Access or Excel to do something, and these don't create log files.

How do we kill these jobs that we can't see? When we run the .bat jobs in VC, they immediately go to Complete status even though they are still running. We used to see them running and could kill them in Task Manager or just close the window. Feels like we are blind here.

It is the way things are. I mean, if you use the Foreground mode it behaves exactly as when launch it from desktop. With the same disadvantages - it is not optimized for background optimizations and requires a desktop session to be there.

Normally when automating things 3 things are returned:

1. exit code - determines success or failure
2. output - normal debugging and info for you
3. error output - error information when Task fails

VisualCron capture these kind of things so if you can return them you can get full information about your processes.

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Sorry for being ignorant, but how does VC pick up these statuses? Do I need another job or task to look for output files to complete this job?

VisualCron launches a Process object which returns this information automatically. You just need to write to output from your script and it will be captured.

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