Scheduled Events

Introduction

With scheduled events you can let the runtime execute a microflow at a specific moment in time. The event can also be repeated with a given interval, for example every day.

A scheduled event is added to your module as a document (right-click your module and you will find it listed under Add other…).

Common Properties

Execution Properties

Timing Properties

Additional information

The platform schedules the scheduled event by fixed intervals. That means that at startup, the platform schedules the next iterations/intervals the scheduled event should run. This is done by retrieving the intervals, and in addition the platform does some calculations.

Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, and Weeks are scheduled exactly as configured. However, Months and Years might not be executed as you would expect. A month is interpreted as a 31 day interval, a year as a 365 day interval.

If you schedule an event to start at March 1, it will run on April 1, May 2, Jun 2, Jul 3, Aug 3, Sep 3, etc. So be aware when scheduling your events, because it is possible that they will run 1 day of what you have been expecting.

This is a simplified example of the implementation of how the Mendix 5.3.2 release calculated the interval. Later releases might behave slightly different.

switch(scheduledEvent.getIntervalType())
{
    case SECOND:
        timeUnit = TimeUnit.SECONDS;
        interval = scheduledEvent.getInterval();
        break;
    case MINUTE:
        timeUnit = TimeUnit.MINUTES;
        interval = scheduledEvent.getInterval();
        break;
    case HOUR:
        timeUnit = TimeUnit.HOURS;
        interval = scheduledEvent.getInterval();
        break;
    case DAY:
        timeUnit = TimeUnit.DAYS;
        interval = scheduledEvent.getInterval();
        break;
    case WEEK:
        timeUnit = TimeUnit.DAYS;
        interval = scheduledEvent.getInterval()*7;
        break;
    case MONTH:
        timeUnit = TimeUnit.DAYS;
        interval = scheduledEvent.getInterval()*31;
        break;
    case YEAR:
        timeUnit = TimeUnit.DAYS;
        interval = scheduledEvent.getInterval()*365;
        break;
}

In your microflow you should start with a decision and do an expression such as:

parseInteger( formatDateTime( [%CurrentDateTime%], 'dd') ) = 1

or

parseInteger( formatDateTime( [%CurrentDateTime%], 'dd') ) = 15
// This will run the scheduled event on the 1st and 15th of the month

Or as Herbert Vujik suggests, use this expression for running it on the last day of the month:

formatDateTime([%CurrentDateTime%], 'dd') = formatDateTime([%EndOfCurrentMonth%], 'dd') 

In addition to Monthly scheduled events, you also want to be careful when scheduling daily events. If you schedule an event to run every day at a specific time, you also need to be aware of daylight saving time.

Whenever you set up an event to run every day at a certain time, it will start at exactly the specified time. However, after this it will run at a fixed interval (internally this is calculated back to run every X nanoseconds). This means that a daily event runs every 24 hours. Therefore, if the time changes because of daylight saving, your event could be an hour off.

But this is only applicable depending on the locale (time zone) your server is hosted in. No matter what option you pick from your perspective, if you are in a country that adapts daylight savings, you will notice the scheduled event run an hour off schedule. When scheduling an event to start at a certain UTC time, the platform technically won’t have a problem, because UTC doesn’t know daylight saving. However your users will still experience the event to run at a different hour.

Unfortunately there isn’t a great workaround for this issue. You could create a similar solution as described above. This can be done with the same type of expressions, except instead of using date format expression ‘dd’, you should use ‘HH’ (0-23 hours), or ‘kk’ (1-24 hours).