Refresh parameters for TTS task

My company has 260 tasks defined to run automatically by means of the task scheduler (TTS); the vast majority of these tasks are procedures that look for specific situations (e.g. open orders that should have been supplied) and assuming that there is output, send the report by email to a user group. These procedures have their parameters defined within their code. 

One procedure - not mine - that does not have its parameters defined internally is MRP. This procedure can of course be run manually, and there are over ten parameters that the user can change, not including several system constants that generally do not change. In order to run MRP successfully by the TTS, this task has an entry in the field 'run according to the input of user'. I have always understood that an automatic invocation of MRP will run using the parameters of a given user, and that if I want to change the parameters for the automatic run, then first I would have to run MRP manually and in doing so, change the parameters to their new values. Or so I thought.

Until now, the value of the parameter 'open work orders until' has been 'the end of the next quarter'; this currently would be 30/09/25. As unusually we have some orders with a supply date in October, no work orders were being created for these lines. The production manager wanted to know the reason for this; I explained, and we agreed that the value of this parameter would be changed to 'the end of the next year', at the moment 31/12/26. I ran MRP manually, entering this value, and indeed work orders were created for those orders with an October supply date from this run. 

I was thus surprised to see that in the next automatic run of MRP, the 'open work orders until' parameter had reverted to 30/09/25. My understanding of how to change parameters for automatic invocation was flawed. It turns out that there is a simple, but rarely used, fix for this situation: one can run a procedure (by direct invocation) called TTSUSERINPUT, 'Refresh Task Input by User'. It transpires that the task has its own set of parameters and these are updated from the user's values by means of this procedure. And indeed, the next automatic run of MRP after running this procedure was run according to the updated parameters.

File under  'Learn something new every day' ....