Tom, in going over the Job MIB v.83, I was surprised to see the change
to JobSumbissionID format 0.
Previously, format 0 was defined such that, if no submission ID was passed
in, the agent would use whatever algorithm it desired to provide one. The
recommendation was for the agent to simply reflect the jmJobIndex here.
I recall a lot of discussion at Nashua about moving JobOwner to the Job Table
and providing a new (additional) JobSubmissionID format based on JobOwner. I
was expecting this to be something like format 8, not a replacement for format
0.
There's a pretty big question in my mind exactly WHY we think JobOwner needs
to be part of a default format 0, especially since jmJobOwner is a mandatory
object in the Job Table. I only offer the following definition as a potential
compromise. I would prefer to keep format 0 as previously defined... basically
agent assigned.
If the desire is to have the agent use JobOwner (if supplied) in the default
case, we could stipulate this within format 0 but then I would still like to
see a separate format (8) for JobOwner passed in as a JobSubmissionID. This
way, the decimal portions can overlap without danger of ambiguity.
So, to be more precise, we could define format 0 as
'0' octets 2-40: last 39 bytes of jmJobOwner.
octets 41-48: 8 decimal-digit sequential number (preferably equal to
jmJobIndex).
'8' octets 2-40: last 39 bytes of jmJobOwner.
octets 41-48: 8 decimal-digit sequential number
Now... for all you agent developers out there... I should warn you that having
the agent add JobOwner into the JobSubmissionID may not be as simple as it
sounds. Think of the fact that JobOwner may start out "blank" when you first
create the format 0 ID but may assume a value from the LPR control file at the
end of the job. The agent should probably feel obliged to MODIFY
JobSubmissionID
with the new JobOwner information.
Note that, in my scenario, including JobOwner in the control file is not
considered the same as passing in a format 8 jmJobSubmissionID with 8 digit
sequential number. If this were to occur, then I'd say format 8 was in use.
Harry Lewis - IBM Printing Systems