Could I ask for a the implementation of user-defined variables with Group scope?

I find I have several groups of jobs (with more on the way!) which follow a similar pattern, many of the differences are simply:
- the paths they look at and
- the name of the process they're supporting.

I'd love to be able to clone the jobs, set the value of two or three variables and move on.

Currently I have to go through each task, in each job and find each reference to the input path and change it, find every reference to the output path and change it and find each reference to the process name and change it. And normally I miss one or two of these references. Not the end of the world, but I reckon there's a better way. Define those items for each group, and the many of the jobs/tasks can be completely identical with other similar jobs/tasks in other groups.

(BTW because as I have mentioned I have various more or less identical tasks, they have more or less identical names. So when I get a message saying "Trigger xyz has been inactivated", I'm left scratching my head as to which of my tasks called xyz it's refering to, the one in Group A or Group B or Group C? Could you provide the Group's name too?)

So a year later and with more than 250 jobs and about 70 groups, this still all applies.

I want the same thing please! In general it would be useful to have more private variables in vc, both on group and job scope. I use many variables on jobs that are meant to be constants, but they are visible to any any other job, and could potentially be manipulated from the outside. So where we declare variables, a checkbox we could mark as private would be very useful

Thomas

Can I just add this is a fundamental matter of scalability.

As things stand you can't really just clone jobs and be sure they will work as the original job did, because they may read/write the same variables.

thus every job has to be refactored, and then retested, debugged...

So I have an upload to SFTP job for every client we have. One client. Good. Three clients, they'd be very unlikely to conflict. Twenty clients, (my current situation) mmmmm occasional untraceable problems probably. 100 clients (which we're aiming for in two years -- this is going to be unreliable. Because the lack of variable scope means it can't scale.

Absolutely a must have. I thought that visualcron had this, purchased a 5 user license, and now am regretting it. This does NOT scale correctly as peter mentioned