Scheduler

Schedule your runs

Fast2 has a module allowing you to schedule your next runs. This feature is accessible only through the run place. Click on the clock icon at the top banner and you’re in.

Jobs purpose

A table of jobs is displayed, each line representing a job. The latter will be used to plan your next runs. However, a few details are needed in order to let the job perform the given action.

A job is composed as follow :

  • A unique name composed exclusively of alphanumerical characters. Dash and underscore are accepted, others are forbidden. It’s imposible to create two jobs with the same name.
  • The map to run : you can pick in the dropdown list any map created earlier.
  • A campaign : specify the name the dedicated input field. You can either write the name of an already existing campaign or a new one.
  • A CRON expression to schedule precisely your runs.
  • An action among Start as new, Rerun, Stop or Resume. It’s precisely the same actions you can do in the run place.
  • A boolean activate to indicate if you’re job must be ran or not (useful feature to have a job stand by, already configured for later operations).

The other columns are purely indicatives. You will find the number of executions for each job, the date of the last and when the next run has been planned.

Jobs are automatically saved when all their fields are correctly filled. If the name or the CRON expression have errors, you have to fix these errors to make the job savable.

Caution

Despite Fast2 validates the name and the CRON expression, the match between the campaign and the job action is not tested. It is the user’s responsibility to have a clear idea about what to do with which campaign.

If the action of a job is to stop a campaign, nothing will happen if the campaign is not running. The behavior is the same as the run place. See our run section as a reminder in case you need it.

Cron expression

A CRON is a String composed of 6 or 7 fields separated by spaces. Each field represents a specific section of time. The 1st field will be the second unit, the 2nd one will concern the minutes and so on. All the fields are listed below with the allowed characters.

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 , - * /

Examples of cron

These examples are basic ones but they highlight the interest of using cron expressions.

  • 0 15 10 * * ? → Fire at 10:15am every day
  • * */5 * * * * ? → Fire every 5th minute
  • * 0 0 12 ? * SUN → Fire every Sunday at noon

Cron expressions can be really useful but might quite hard to use. To generate your own cron expressions easily, we suggest you to use some web generator (like freeformatter.com).