Message Handler Manager

You can use the Message Handler Manager to control what error messages your parallel jobs can generate.

What are message handlers? When you run a parallel job, any error messages and warnings are written to an error log and can be viewed from the Director client. You can choose to handle specified errors in a different way by creating one or more message handlers.

A message handler defines rules about how to handle messages generated when a parallel job is running. You can, for example, use one to specify that certain types of message should not be written to the log.

You can edit message handlers in the Designer or in the IBM® InfoSphere® DataStage® Director. The recommended way to create them is by using the Add rule to message handler feature in the Director client.

You can specify message handler use at different levels:

• Project Level. You define a project level message handler in the InfoSphere DataStage Administrator, and this applies to all parallel jobs within the specified project.
• Job Level. From the Designer you can specify that any existing handler should apply to a specific job. When you compile the job, the handler is included in the job executable as a local handler (and so can be exported to other systems if required).

You can also add rules to handlers when you run a job from the Director (regardless of whether it currently has a local handler included). This is useful, for example, where a job is generating a message for every row it is processing. You can suppress that particular message.

When the job runs it will look in the local handler (if one exists) for each message to see if any rules exist for that message type. If a particular message is not handled locally, it will look to the project-wide handler for rules. If there are none there, it writes the message to the job log.

Note message handlers do not deal with fatal error messages, these will always be written to the job log.

You can view, edit, or delete message handlers from the Message Handler Manager. You can also define new handlers if you are familiar with the message IDs (although InfoSphere DataStage will not know whether such messages are warnings or informational). The preferred way of defining new handlers is by using the add rule to message handler feature.