Finally! A use for Enterprise Manager Target Properties with Jobs!

Okay, perhaps I'm overreacting, as I haven't been thinking hard about using Target Properties ("%%") within EM non-stop.  But periodically when I'd see them during the Job creation process, I'd wonder what good are they and will I ever find a use for them.

To explain how I've found a use for them, let me first share a few details about how we configure our environments within EM and how that relates to Job definitions.  We assign all environments to 1 of 2 Groups - Production or Non-Production.  From there all target types are lumped within the appropriate Group.  When we create EM Jobs we try our best to always have the Target refer to a Group and let the Target Type define what resources within the Group will be accessed.

This works great for most situations, except that there's duplication in some cases.  For example, OS Jobs running against a Target Type of "host" will pick up both hosts AND clusters, which means on a given cluster your Job will run once on each node plus once on the cluster's primary node.

In comes Target Properties.  Target Properties are listed on the right side of the screen under the "Parameters" tab when creating a Job in EM, with the list varying based on the Target Type of the Job.

The following is a capture of these Target Properties for a Target Type of "host":

Back to the problem at hand, to have clusters skipped we simply check the "%TargetType%" in the Command:

if [ "%TargetType%" = "host" ]; then . ~/.bash_profile; ; else exit 0; fi

Notice the "else exit 0".  This is needed to avoid clusters returning a non-zero status because they weren't picked by the if-test.