As you might have seen in the Quick start, running a measure from begin to end is a process involving many different steps. If the environment has already been set up and you are only tweaking your measure case source, launching a whole measurement cycle requires more than 10 different commands. Obviously, running them manually each time rapidly becomes cumbersome.
To solve exactly this problematic, pas introduced the concept of workflow. A workflow is nothing else than a Makefile target invoked trough the pas run command.
The pas run command simply takes care to invoke one or more targets locally with the right environment variables set up and the right working directory, as defined in the How will pas invoke make section.
Now that we know how to leverage the power of a make inside pas, let’s take a look at a simple example. We want to be able to run a full measure cycle, from compilation to reporting, with a single command.
This is the command we want to be able to execute:
pas run <case-name> measureall
Then, the targets to add to the measure case specific Makefile to provide the needed interface, would be the following:
measureall: compile measure report
compile:
pas compile $(MEASURE_NAME)
measure:
pas measure start
pas jobmgr start
pas execute $(MEASURE_NAME)
pas jobmgr stop
pas measure stop
pas measure collect $(MEASURE_NAME)
report:
pas report toxml $(MEASURE_NAME)
pas report simplify $(MEASURE_NAME)
pas report decode $(MEASURE_NAME)
pas report report $(MEASURE_NAME)
The Makefile of the bundled simple measure case already contains three additional targets:
- A run target to execute a measure by starting first the measure, then the job managers and in the end running the measure case by tearing it all down and collecting the data when finished.
- A report target to generate the HTML report from the raw measures.
- A reset target (inherited from the base Makefile) which cleans all builds, kills all running measures and job managers and recompiles POP binaries from the sources for all hosts.
This commands composition technique allows us to automate some common workflows and repetitive tasks. For more advanced commands which don’t involve only composition, the custom commands documentation introduces the creation of commands using the very same tools as the pas subsytem.