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Every time an employee makes a benefits change, a new record is stored in the benefits table.  Additionally, a new record is stored in the employee’s deduction master table for each deduction related to that benefit.  If these records are allowed to accumulate unchecked, this can slow down payroll processing and even cause errors.  The larger the benefits and deductions table become, the slower payroll batch jobs will run.  These batch jobs, such as PR140, loop through each record in these benefits and deductions tables so that the correct deductions are applied.  Some of these batch jobs have a limit of the number of records allowed, so if an employee has deductions that exceed that limit, the job will error out.  Also, traversing through these records can greatly slow down processing.

To help alleviate these issues, we recommend running the BN430 benefits purge program periodically.  When you are processing payroll, if you see an error similar to “26 20591 PRDED-DED-TABLE must be increased; Cur size 0500”, chances are you have an employee with too many benefits changes, and need to run the BN430.  But, before you receive this error, you should make the benefits purge part of a normal maintenance process.  Ideally, payroll users would make this part of the payroll process each pay period, and choose a “Purge Through Date” corresponding to your company’s record retention period.

1. Open Infor Rich Client 
2. At the login prompt, enter the Lawson username and password
3. The canvas is now open. Look in the upper left corner and make sure you are pointing to the prod or test data area (not gen) 
4. In the upper right corner, click “Start > Applications > Process Server Administrator > Administration > Channels Administrator”
   1. At this point, you can click, HOLD, and drag the “Channels Administrator” link to the canvas. That way, it will create a shortcut on the canvas. 
5. Once you are in Channels Administrator, click on the File Channels tab, and you should see a list of File Channels that have been set up
6. Locate the channel for which you wish to scan
7. Right click on the channel and select “Scan Now”

8. This will scan the file configured in the Channels Administrator, and kick off any processes that use the files in that directory (the processes are configured in the File Channel Receivers section)

Lawson programs, especially batch jobs, can sometimes take hours to complete. In rare instances, a badly written 4GL batch job can even take days to complete depending on the number of records it has to process and how it goes about doing so. Depending on your skill set, you may be able to optimize the code directly and use a debugger to find out how to speed things up. But if you want some statistics about what the program is doing and a quick shortcut, then there’s a utility for that.

The utility is actually several different utilities wrapped into one.

dbadmin utility to set some parameters. The main parameter you want to set is the TIMESTATS parameter. The timestats function is activated using the dbadmin utility.

Before you go changing stuff, to show current settings, run ‘dbadmin get’ from a LID command prompt or a qsh command prompt in System i.

#Example:
dbadmin get
Current Value for REUSE=ON
Current Value for DEBUG=OFF
Current Value for DBAPIERRORS=ON
Current Value for TIMESTATS=OFF
Current Value for USERFILTER=
Current Value for PROGRAMFILTER=
Current Value for DATAREAFILTER=
Current Value for TIMESTATSDIR=/tmp
Current Value for IDLETIME=1

Save this off for future reference.

#To enable timestats, run the following commands:

dbadmin set timestats on
dbadmin set programfilter programcode   (optional, specify a program code. e.g. AP175.  The default is all programs)
dbadmin set timestatsdir pathname  (optional, ex. /home/username or C:\timestats.  If not specified, stats files are created in /tmp or %TMPDIR% for Windows)
dbadmin set dataareafilter productline  (optional, specify a productline name.  The default is all productlines)
dbadmin set userfilter username   (optional, the default is all users)
dbadmin set reuse off

#Clear the active database drivers so that the changes become effective
dbadmin idleall
tmcontrol -rp productline programcode  (For online programs only)

#Run ‘dbadmin get’ after setting the options to check that the desired options are enabled.

#After should look like this:

Current Value for REUSE=OFF
Current Value for DEBUG=OFF
Current Value for DBAPIERRORS=ON
Current Value for TIMESTATS=ON
Current Value for USERFILTER=
Current Value for PROGRAMFILTER=HR211
Current Value for DATAREAFILTER=test
Current Value for TIMESTATSDIR=d:\lawson\temp\timstats
Current Value for IDLETIME=1

Now you’re ready to submit your job again. Once the job is submitted, you should be able to see the stat files get created in the timestatsdir directory.
Wait until the job has completed before viewing the file(s).

You can view the files after the job is complete but they aren’t all that easy to understand. To make them easier to digest:

Go to the stats directory and run:
analyze_stats -o > stats.out

You’ll notice that you now have two new files in this directory.

stats.out and a cfg file.

The stats.out file will give you a really great view of what’s going on with your program while the cfg file can be place in the xxsrc directory of your code and compiled with the program to optimize it based on the timestats results.

After you’re done:

To turn disable timestats and re-enable driver re-use:

dbadmin set timestats off
dbadmin set reuse on

File Channels are a feature in IPA that is similar to the ScanFile Client feature in ProcessFlow. A File Channel scans a directory periodically for files which will kick off processes in IPA. The files and processes are configured in File Receivers. Here is how to set them up.

How to Set up File Channels

1. Log in to Rich Client 
2. The canvas is now open. Look in the upper left corner and make sure you are pointing to the prod or test data area (not gen) 
3. In the upper right corner, click “Start > Applications > Process Server Administrator > Administration > Channels Administrator”
   
   1. At this point, you can click, HOLD, and drag the “Channels Administrator” link to the canvas. That way, it will create a shortcut on the canvas. 
4. Once you are in Channels Administrator, click on the File Channels tab
5. Click Actions > Create or click the create icon 
6. Overview Tab
   
   1. Enter a meaningful channel name
   2. Enter a description for the channel
   3. Check “Is Enabled”
      1. This can be unchecked when the file scanner is not needed
   4. Choose the channel type
      1. Local points to a directory on the local server
      2. Remote requires FTP to be enabled on the local server and the remote server
   5. Enter the directory that will be scanned by the file channel
   6. Choose whether to match case sensitivity on the file
   7. Enter an error file directory
      1. This is where files will go if there is an error in the scanning (NOT an error in the flow)
   8. Enter an in-progress file directory
      1. This is where files will go once they are successfully scanned
   9. Choose a scan interval (in minutes)
7. Click the Save icon 

How to Set up File Channel Receivers

1. Once you have created your File Channel, you must now set up the File Channel Receivers, which will configure the files that are picked up during a scan
2. Make sure your File Channel is deactivated
   1. File Receivers cannot be created or modified if the File Channel is active
   2. Go to the File Channels screen
   3. Right click on the File Channel for which you are adding a receiver
   4. Select “Deactivate” 
3. Open your new File Channel and navigate to the File Channel Receivers tab
4. Click Actions > Create or click the create icon 
5. Enter the Receiver details
   

1. Enter a name for the Receiver
2. Enter a description
3. Choose the file name for which the receiver will be scanning
   1. You can use regular expressions here
4. Select the process that should begin when the file is found in a scan
5. Choose the Startup Type

• Click the Save icon 
• Be sure to reactivate your File Channel so that it can begin scanning for your files