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Scheduling Jobs

After you create a project, you can schedule it to run at a future time, or at regular, repeated intervals. For example, you can set up a project to run every hour or every day.

Figure 1. The Schedule Module
Figure shows the Schedule Details for the Schedule Module
Note: If one or more jobs of a project are already running when the schedule activates, the system checks the Run Limit property of the project. The system does not launch the scheduled job if the number of running copies of the project equals the Run Limit. Set the Run Limit value to 1 if you want the system to skip a run if the prior run has not yet completed.
  1. Click the Add Scheduled Run button.

  2. Enter a description for the schedule entry.

  3. Select the project (in this case Hello World) from the Project list.

  4. You can leave the Owner, Environment, Selector, and Mode at their default values for this example, but note the following:

    • The scheduled job runs as if manually launched by the Owner.

    • If you specify an environment here, you can also set starting values just as if you manually started the project.

    • If you specify an environment and/or selector, your selections override the project settings for environment and/or selector for the scheduled run only.

    • The Mode field options are Active, Inactive, and Once. When Once is selected, the schedule runs only on the next occasion that matches the time parameters, instead of repeating for every time that matches.

  5. Change the Hour field to an asterisk.

  6. Change the Minute field to "*/5". This specifies every 5 minutes. (The schedule parameters work like the UNIX® tool cron.)

  7. Click Save Schedule to save the schedule entry.

After you add the schedule entry, the system starts to calculate the next runtime for the project; the Next Run column shows "Calculating" until the next scheduled time can be displayed.

When the system has computed the next runtime for the project, it displays it in the Next Run column.

The system displays a dynamic calendar on the Schedules page, as well as the form displayed when modifying a schedule. The calendar shows the number of projects scheduled for a given day, for two months (the current and upcoming months) and you can mouse over individual days to see the names and schedule parameters of all the projects scheduled for a given day. If you have more than one project scheduled, the system displays a dropdown box to allow you to filter the calendar display by project.

Use the Refresh link to refresh the page in a few seconds to see the next run time. Wait until the schedule time has arrived and then refresh the Jobs > Completed page to see the executed job.

If you end up with many extraneous runs after you experiment with scheduling, you can delete them by changing the properties of the project's class. You can control other features of project types using classes; see the topic on classes for more information.

You can disable a schedule temporarily, or configure it to run once. When you create a schedule, the system displays a green circle next to it to indicate that it is enabled. Click the green circle to change it to a blue one, which indicates the schedule will run once. Click it again to change it to a red circle, indicating the schedule is disabled; while disabled, the project does not run.

You can also use schedules to denote when purges should be performed, so that the system does not try to run purge jobs when the system is otherwise occupied.

Related concepts
Automatically Deleting Jobs