I'm taking over ETL at my company. The previous developer has been using VisualCron to execute VB6 applications for years. (Launching an .exe using "Execute" in the "Process" section). The called VB6 app will run, and then exit. If there was an error during the VB6 execution, code WITHIN the app emails someone. Since you can't return a proper 'exit code' when exiting a VB6 program, VisualCron shows every job as FAILED, even when it ran successfully, which is a problem when trying to monitor jobs and set up dependencies and such in VisualCron.

I realize VB6 is ancient, and we will be looking into something better, but we have a LOT of work ahead of us. In the meantime....

Does anyone know how to run a VB6 program and get a proper success/failure from VisualCron's perspective?

Good luck with that! sounds like a lot of work. As fas as I can tell this is close to impossible to do in a safe manner. I have seen some suggestions that you should let the vb6 program write the result to a file, then read the result from the file and go from there. It is a pretty awful solution, but that's how it is. There is some useful info in this link:

https://www.arcanadev.com/support/kb/K00000084 

To translate this to a VisualCron scenario, I would test this (I have never actually tried this):

1) Change the vb6 code to write the result a file

2) Add a task in VC that deletes the old result file. This is to prevent you from reading the result of the previous execution.

2) In the execute task i VC, go to the on error tab and uncheck 'Non zero code' . My guess is that this is why VC reports failure, regarldess of what the result of the VB6 application is



3) Add a Wait task in VC. This will have to be set to some amount of time where you are sure the VB6 app is done processing

4) Read the result from the file, and take it from there

As I said, it is an awful solution, but until you can rewrite it to a proper language, it may be just about workable.

Hopefully support has a better solution!