Control Flow on First Step

I have a job that can have 2 steps, and depending on arguments and how the job gets invoked, I may not want both steps to run. Sometimes I would like to perform step1 first, then step2, but other times I only want to perform step 2. Is there any way, aside from creating a pre-step that makes a decision on those arguments? I can interrogate the parms in the reader itself and just "return null", but I'd like to keep job flow logic out of the job.

Right now I am simply exiting the first step if a certain parameter is not set. It seems like there should be a better way to do this.

I would use a decision to start the job. That decision would interrogate the parameters passed in and either send the user to step 1 or step 2 as required. This allows your steps to be decoupled of that flow (as they should be).

Thanks for you help.

So, can you actually start the job with a decision? It looks like I'd have to create a fake step or something on which the decision would act.

The following is allowed:

Code:

---

        <job id="deciderFirstJob">
                <decision decider="myDecider" id="decider1">
                        <next on="*" to="step1"/>
                        <next on="OTHER" to="step2"/>
                        <fail on="ERROR"/>
                </decision>
                <step id="step1" parent="formatFileStep"/>
                <step id="step2" parent="formatFileStep"/>
        </job>

---

It works, thanks.