Network Access for Jobs

If your jobs need access to files on network devices, please review the following information.

Mapped versus Unmapped Network Drives

There are two approaches applications typically use for referring to network resources.

UNC Paths

The preferred approach is to refer to the resource using its UNC designation. If your program needs to read the file data1.dat on share proddata on server prod1, it would refer to the file as \\prod1\proddata\data1.dat.

Drive Letters

Unfortunately some applications—especially those that were not originally developed with batch execution in mind—require drive letter mappings instead. In this approach, the application relies on a particular drive letter being mapped to the network resource.

For example, using our resource from the previous example, the drive letter K: is mapped to \\prod1\proddata\. The application then refers to the file as K:\data1.dat.

Drive letters may be mapped using Windows Explorer and through batch files (using the net use command).

Using UNC Paths

If your application (program, batch file, script, etc.) refers to network resource using UNC paths, you generally do not need to take any special steps to provide access. The one exception to this is if you need to use different credentials for the network resource than you are using for the job. In this case, you will need to add a network resource to the job, connecting using the appropriate credentials.

Using Drive Letters

If your application uses mapped drive letters, we strongly recommend changing it to use UNC paths instead, so that it does not have to rely on drive letters being correctly mapped. If this is not possible, you will need to set up drive letter mappings in adTempus, as described in the remainder of this section.

Drive letter mappings required by your application must be mapped on the Resources page of the job's properties. You must not rely on drive mappings that were made outside of adTempus.

For example, you may have used Windows Explorer to map the drive letter K: to a particular network resource. When you run your program yourself, it is able to read data from drive K: without any problems. However, this drive letter mapping belongs to your logon session, and is only available to programs that run in the same logon session. If the job runs under a different user account, it will not have access to this drive mapping. Further, even if the job runs under your user account, this drive mapping is only loaded if you are logged in interactively at the computer. If the job runs while you are not logged in interactively, the drive mapping will not exist.