Advanced Scheduling

This topic describes the concept of Advanced Scheduling.

Advanced Scheduling refers to the versatile scheduling options available to set a trigger interval for agents, such that it suits the business needs of an organization rather than the limited ability to trigger agents at fixed or specific intervals.

Advanced scheduling can be achieved through time-based job scheduler such as cron. However, setting up and maintaining system-level crons is an overhead and not a scalable approach to implement advanced scheduling for multiple agent criteria. Therefore, the application enables you to configure the advanced scheduling options from within the Agent Criteria Details interface of the Applications Manager.

To provide a cron-like scheduling ability in the Applications Manager, a cron-based open source job scheduling library called Quartz is integrated with Sterling Order Management System Software.

See Specifying a transaction as time-triggered for details about using the Advanced Scheduling feature. The scheduling options that are selected on the user interface are converted into a cron expression that is validated by the Quartz library. Once a valid cron expression is entered, it is saved along with other agent criteria runtime parameters in the database.

A Quartz Job is created by using the agent invocation logic for each agent criteria. A Quartz cron trigger is formed from the cron expression for the agent criteria. The scheduler process takes each job, its corresponding cron trigger, and then starts a schedule. This is done for each agent criteria served by the agent server. There is no more initial trigger for any of the jobs.

The time schedule configured for the cron trigger is based on the underlying time-zone of the system.