[Bioperl-pipeline] creating jobs, job_setup

[Alexandre Dehne]

Hi,

First, I would like to congratulate the Biopipe team for having created such a useful tool.


The context : 
For several reasons (some goods and some not so good), some of my runnables take nothing in input and return nothing. 

The problem : 
This type of runnables does not match the biopipe "spirit", so it is a problem to create jobs for these runnables via the "create_job" function which needs a array input.

The "temporary" unrighteous solution : 
I have created an InputCreate module named setup_nothing which creates a void input like the following :
    my @input=$self->create_input("nothing",'',"infile");
    my $job   = $self->create_job($next_anal,\@input);
    $self->dbadaptor->get_JobAdaptor->store($job);
This way, I launch one job on my analysis as well as on the following ones by placing "<action>COPY_ID_FILE</action>" in their respective rules in the XML file.


The questions : 
Is there a clean way to create jobs without any input (a just_do_it function ?) ? 
Perhaps the <job_setup> mark in the XML file ?
Also, could someone tell me more about this <job_setup> mark ??? 


Thank you in advance


Alexandre