Editing C&I Wiki Portal/ToolsDevelopmentGuideline (section)

===== Meta-Jobs =====
There are also things we refer to as "Metajobs".  These jobs are actually run early on and are simply used to generate jobs on the fly.  In general, you would use a metajob to create separate jobs for multiple pieces of the same hardware.  In the following example, we have a metajob that creates a separate storage test for any disk device (NON-USB) discovered.

<pre>
plugin: local
name: disk/ocp/io_stress
requires:
 device.category == 'DISK'
 package.name == 'stressapptest'
_description: Verify that storage devices, such as Fibre Channel and RAID can be detected and perform under stress.
command:
 cat <<'EOF' | run_templates -t -s 'udev_resource | filter_templates -w "category=DISK"'
 plugin: shell
 name: disk/ocp/io_stress_`ls /sys$path/block`
 user: root
 requires:
  device.path == "$path"
  block_device.`ls /sys$path/block`_state != 'removable'
 description: Disk I/O stress test for $product
 command: disk_stress `ls /sys$path/block | sed 's|!|/|'`
 EOF
</pre>

Note the differences between a Metajob and a normal Job.
;Plugin
:'''local''' is a special plugin that tells Checkbox to run this job as soon as the tool starts. This means this job is executed well before the user ever sees a Suite or Test Selection screen.
;requires
:This job also introduces the '''requires''' directive.  This means that the following conditions must be met before the job will be run.  
:Also note that you can specify multiple requirements by placing each one on a new line with a single-space indention.
;Command
:In the basic example, I mentioned that a '''Command''' can be embedded shell code.  This is an example of that embedded shell code.  This runs the shell code that follows.  In this example, it cats all the text between the 'cat' line and the 'EOF' marker (which looks exactly like the Basic Job Description) and pipes all that through the 'run-templates' helper tool which creates on-the-fly jobs.  In this case, 'run-templates' also executes the udev-resource resource gathering script and ensures that child jobs are ONLY created for hardware devices that fit into the DISK category (so we don't create these Disk jobs for network devices or CPUs).