Notes on the "Spreadsheet Process"

Information regarding the current methods of processing task requests is being added to the Main ProdSys page. The spreadsheet is used to model the graph representation of the Meta-Task (the object that's missing in the ProdSys I model), and to serve simultaneously as the database and the UI for th workflow management system.

 Here, we present a few points as an overview of the "spreadsheet process":

• A spreadsheet is created according to a specific template. The format is that of the Apache Open Office (ODS).
• The information in the spreadsheet is accessed by parsing the XML contents of the file in which it is saved. The module xml.dom.minidom is used in the processing scripts
• In general, parsing is done for each stage of the "chain", i.e. event generation, simulation and reconstruction. There can be merging steps performed in between.
• Each script, when run, produces a text file with information specifying task parameter for the specific step.
• The scripts can detect certain type of errors, which will be flagged in the output and can be detected, e.g. by using "grep".
• The text files generated in this process can be submitted to the Production System using one of two methods: (a) Web interface, where the user can copy and paste the contents of a file (b) by using a CLI script which will access the same Web service

Apart from the process described above, there can be validation procedures applied to the data. One important aspect of the existing quite of scripts is SVN access, which may present portability issues (i.e. when running at a site outside of CERN perimeter). These notes will be updated and augmented as we proceed with analyzing the code and data flow.