Understanding the Job Has Changed Warning

The jobs that you create in SAS Data Integration Studio are frequently run more than once or used by more than one user. Sometime the contents of a job can change, often in subtle ways, between one run and the next. Other times, one user can change a job without notifying the job’s other users. For example, you can create and save a job that contains the following objects:

a source table, such as a list of all the employees in a business
the Splitter transformation
two output tables, one for male employees and another for female employees

The source table in the example can then be deleted from the Inventory pane.

When the job is reopened, the warning window in the following display appears:

Job Has Changed Message

This message warns you that the job has changed and briefly describes the change. When you click OK, the changed job is shown in the process flow diagram. In this example, the source table has been removed because its metadata was removed from SAS Data Integration Studio when you deleted it. At this point, you can take corrective action, such as adding an updated table as the source for the Splitter transformation.

The warning alerts you to the fact that the job has changed. Without the warning, you can see the changed job. However, you are given no indication of what has changed. The principal scenarios that generate the warning include the following:

changes to the generated transformations used in jobs, such as deleting an output table.
deletion of the metadata for a physical table that is attached to a transformation in a job.
absence of a generated transformation in a job when the job is loaded. This scenario can occur when you create a generated transform and export a job with it but do not include the generated transformation in the export. If the metadata server that you import the job to does not have the transformation, you see the job has changed warning when you open the job.
absence of a custom Java transformation in a job when the job is loaded. This scenario can occur when you create a custom Java transformation and export a job with it but do not include the transformation in the export. If the metadata server that you import the job to does not have the transformation, you see the job has changed warning when you open the job.
items that are out of synchronization with XML such as indexes in a tables list or a transformation in a list. This scenario can occur when a user modifies the job metadata outside of SAS Data Integration Studio clients.

Last updated: January 16, 2018