Job generation involves the following processes:

• Locating the '.ecf' files
• Locating the includes files specified in the '.ecf' file
• Removing comment and manual pre-processor statements
• Variable substitution
• Creating the job file on disk

This process can be checked on the client side, with the python API. Since this API is used for checking, the jobs are all generated with the extension '.job0'. The following example checks job generation for all tasks.

 defs = ecflow.Defs('my.def') # load file 'my.def' into memory
 job_ctrl = ecflow.JobGenCtrl()
 defs.check_job_generation(job_ctrl) # job files generated to ECF_JOB
 print job_ctrl.get_error_msg() # report any errors in job generation

For brevity the following examples do not show how the 'defs' object. This can be read in from disk as shown above or created directly in python. This example shows checking of job generation for all tasks under '/suite/to_check'

 job_ctrl = ecflow.JobGenCtrl()
 job_ctrl.set_node_path('/suite/to_check') # hierarchical job generation under /suite/to_check
 defs.check_job_generation(job_ctrl) # do the check
 print job_ctrl.get_error_msg() # report any errors in job generation

This example shows checking of job generation for all tasks, but where the jobs are generated to a user specified directory. i.e. '/tmp/ECF_NAME.job0

 job_ctrl = ecflow.JobGenCtrl() 
 job_ctrl.set_dir_for_job_generation("/tmp") # generate jobs file under this directory
 defs.check_job_generation(job_ctrl)
 print job_ctrl.get_error_msg()

This example show job checking to an automatically generated temporary directory $TMPDIR/ecf_check_job_generation/ECF_NAME.job0

 job_ctrl = ecflow.JobGenCtrl() 
 job_ctrl.generate_temp_dir() 
 defs.check_job_generation(job_ctrl)
 print job_ctrl.get_error_msg()