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Managing the jobs directory

Managing the jobs directory

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One of the properties of a geoprocessing service is the job directory, as illustrated below. You can create multiple job directories and use different ones for different services.

Choosing a jobs directory

When a task within the service executes, ArcGIS Server creates a folder for the task within the jobs directory, shown as <unique job id> in the illustration below. Within this task folder is a scratch folder and a scratch file geodatabase. The geoprocessing scratch workspace environment is set to the location of the scratch folder. You write your intermediate and output data to the scratch folder or the scratch geodatabase.

NOTE: If your server configuration includes multiple computers on your local area network (LAN), the jobs directory for a service must be a shared directory accessible by all computers in your configuration. This means that when you publish your service, the jobs directory for your service will be the UNC pathname to this shared jobs directory.

Learn more about deploying services on multiple computers.

Intermediate and output data location

Job directories have a cleaning mode and schedule

Each job directory has a cleaning mode and schedule. The schedule is in minutes. The cleaning mode can be one of the following:

The mode and schedule are the instructions ArcGIS Server uses to delete the task folder created for each task execution. It is up to you to determine an appropriate cleaning mode and schedule as in these examples:

Creating and editing job directories

Setting up job directories is a server administrator task. However, as the creator of a service, you may need to know how set up a new job directory. The basic steps are as follows:

  1. Create a directory in the file system and configure its sharing and permissions. If you want the contents accessible via the Web, you will need to create a virtual directory as well.
  2. Learn more about creating server directories.

  3. In ArcCatalog, navigate to your server and stop all services.
  4. In the ArcCatalog tree, right-click the server and click Server Properties.
  5. In the ArcGIS Server Properties dialog box, choose Jobs Directory as the Directory Type, as illustrated below.
  6. Click Add.
  7. Server Directories

  8. In the Add Server Directory dialog box
  9. Add job directory dialog box

  10. After adding a new job directory, you can edit any of the geoprocessing services and change their job directory.

Creating a URL to the task folder

If your job directory has a virtual directory, you can construct a URL to the scratch folder. The following Python code snippet demonstrates how to construct the URL. This technique is used in the sendemail.py script found in the ClipAndShip example.

jobsDir = ## ex: "d:\arcgisserver\arcgisjobs"

virtualDir = ## ex: "http://abcd/arcgisjobs"

scratchDir = gp.scratchWorkspace.lower()

# Form the URL to the scratch directory. Replace backslashes with url forward slash

# convention

#

url = scratchDir.lower().replace(jobsDir, virtualDir)

url = url.replace("\\", "/")