7. Scheduler widget

Summary: Widgets come in form of "Collection Lists", "Collection Charts", "Collection info", "RSS Feed", "HTML" & "Scheduler". They all have in common that they want to show some data or information to you. Maybe you already heard about widgets while you were creating your dashboard? In this article we want to give some more specific information about schedulers.

When you are viewing a scheduler, you will see an overview of scheduled tasks. Let's take the example of our Calibration Planning. The tasks are grouped by there collection

You can edit a scheduled task by clicking on the pencil before the task. We discuss all the fields when we will create a new scheduled task later in this article.

You can delete a task by clicking on the cross before the task

At the top you see the Power search, a refresh button, a trash can button and a plus button:

Power search: You can fill in a word, a sentence, ... The power search will search in all the columns of each record in the overview for this word or sentence.
Refresh button: By clicking on this icon, you will refresh the overview list of scheduled tasks.
Trash can: By clicking on this icon you go to the overview of all deleted scheduled tasks.
Plus button: When you click on the plus button, you can make a new scheduled task and fill in the name, start date, end scheduler based on and choose when the task needs to restart (after minutes, hourly, daily (also possible to choose for only week days), weekly, or yearly).You also see the form of the collection. Fill in the fields that needs to be filled in at the first step of the workflow (start step). The scheduler will push the form to the next step in the workflow on the time that you have choosen and the task will be send out.

CRON expressions to schedule a recurrence pattern

Name: Name of your recurrence item Start date: Start date to define when the first run of your recurrence patern…

Name: Name of your recurrence item

Start date: Start date to define when the first run of your recurrence patern can be scheduled. Important: The start date does not count as the date to start the calculation of the recurrence patern.
For example if you create a scheduled task on the first of January to do someting every 6 months in April and Oktober. If you don't set a start date after April 1st, the first run will be on April 1st. If you wnat the first run to be on October 1st, you should set the start date after APril 1st and before October 1st.

Stop date: after this date, no new recurrences will be triggered

Advances tab:

If the expression builders are not able to create your recurrence patern, you can use a manual CRON expression in the advanced tab. A CROn expression has maximum 7 parameters devided by a space.
The 7 parts are:

Field Name	Mandatory	Allowed Values	Allowed Special Characters
Seconds	YES	0-59	, - * /
Minutes	YES	0-59	, - * /
Hours	YES	0-23	, - * /
Day of month	YES	1-31	, - * ? / L W
Month	YES	1-12 or JAN-DEC	, - * /
Day of week	YES	1-7 or SUN-SAT	, - * ? / L #
Year	NO	empty, 1970-2099	, - * /

Special characters

* ("all values"): used to select all values within a field.
For example: * in the minute field means "every minute".
? ("no specific value"): useful when you need to specify something in one of the two fields in which the character is allowed, but not the other.
For example: if you want your trigger to fire on a particular day of the month (say, the 10th), but don't care what day of the week that happens to be, you should put 10 in the day-of-month field, and ? in the day-of-week field.
- ("range"): used to specify ranges.
For example: 10-12 in the hour field means "the hours 10, 11 and 12".
,: used to specify additional values.
For example: MON,WED,FRI in the day-of-week field means "the days Monday, Wednesday, and Friday".
/: used to specify increments.
For example: 0/15 in the seconds field means "the seconds 0, 15, 30, and 45". And 5/15 in the seconds field means "the seconds 5, 20, 35, and 50". You can also specify / after the "character - in this case" is equivalent to having '0' before the '/'. 1/3 in the day-of-month field means "fire every 3 days starting on the first day of the month".
L ("last"): has different meaning in each of the two fields in which it is allowed.
- In Day of Month: "the last day of the month". So day 31 for January, day 28 for February on non-leap years.
- In Day of Week: it means "7" or "SAT".
- Used in the Day of Week field after another value: it means "the last xxx day of the month".
  For example: 6L means "the last Friday of the month".
  You can also specify an offset from the last day of the month, such as L-3 which would mean the third-to-last day of the calendar month.
  When using the L option, it is important not to specify lists, or ranges of values, as you'll get confusing/unexpected results.
W ("weekday"): used to specify the weekday (Monday-Friday) nearest the given day.
For example: 15W as the value for the day-of-month field, the meaning is: "the nearest weekday to the 15th of the month". So if the 15th is a Saturday, the trigger will fire on Friday the 14th. If the 15th is a Sunday, the trigger will fire on Monday the 16th. If the 15th is a Tuesday, then it will fire on Tuesday the 15th.
However if you specify 1W as the value for day-of-month, and the 1st is a Saturday, the trigger will fire on Monday the 3rd, as it will not 'jump' over the boundary of a month's days. The W character can only be specified when the day-of-month is a single day, not a range or list of days.

Example:

Fire every 1st of April and October at 9:15 AM:
CRON: 0 15 9 1 4/6 ? *
- 0 15 9 => Seconds minutes hours => 9:15 AM
- 1 => 1st day of month
- 4/6 => start in 4th month of the year (= April) and then every 6 months (April, October, April, October etc.)
- ? => It doesn't matter wich day of the week
- * => every single year