Scheduling

Scheduled Translations are the best way to kick off a workspace at a particular time or date

What is Scheduling?

Scheduling is the ability to program FME Server to run a workspace in a repository, at a specific time in the future. The schedule can cause the workspace to run once or on a repeating basis.

Managing Scheduled Tasks

Scheduled tasks are set up in a the Web User Interface. Apart from a quick link on the main page for adding a scheduled task, there is a section under the Manage menu:

The interface supports all the capabilities you would expect, including the ability to create, delete, copy, enable and disable scheduled tasks:

Creating a Scheduled Task

There are a number of parameters involved in creating a scheduled task.

The first parameters are very simple ones for naming and describing the schedule.

Notice that each schedule can be assigned to a particular category.

There is also a parameter for deciding whether the schedule will be enabled straight away.

The next few parameters concentrate on the workspace to be run.

Once a workspace is selected there will be a short pause while FME retrieves information about the workspace. It will then expose any published parameters that exist in the workspace:

The key parameters, of course, are for setting the actual schedule. Here the workspace is set to run every week starting on the 27th February at 2:00am

There are also optional parameters for notification topics to trigger on completion of the scheduled task. These could be used to inform an administrator of the success or failure of the translation.

Finally there are options to control job priority, job routing (which engine it should use) and job expiry (for jobs that are time-sensitive and would be no longer useful if held back past a certain time by higher priority tasks).

Once the parameters are set for a scheduled task, it is added to the main Scheduling interface.

Notice that there are a number of pre-defined jobs, automatically installed with FME Server for the purpose of backing-up and maintaining various components.

This is a simple exercise to schedule a workspace to translate data.

1. Open Web User Interface

Open the FME Server Web User Interface and log in.

2. Select Schedules

Select Schedule Workspace from the homepage.

3. Create Schedule

Click New on the schedules menu to start creating a new schedule.

Enter a name for the schedule (something like ApartmentSchedule) and enter a name for a new category (like MySchedules)

For the workspace to execute select the repository called Samples and in there select the workspace austinApartments.fmw

4. Set Schedule

For the schedule itself, use the following settings: Start date: Check Immediately in order to verify that the schedule works.

Repeats: Interval Based.

Repeat Unit: Minute

Interval: 1

End Date: Choose a date 5 minutes in the future.

Be aware that times are in the 24-hour clock and are in the same time zone as the client.

Click OK to create the schedule.

5. Check Results

Click on the Jobs menu entry and the Completed tab. You will see the results of the completed scheduled jobs occurring at one minute intervals.

Advanced Task

As an advanced (and optional) task, why not try to issue a notification for when a workspace fails.

1. Add Topic

Under the Notification dialogs add a new Topic called schedule_notification

2. Add Subscription

Now add a new Subscription called schedule_notification_email. It should be an email protocol and it should be subscribed to the schedule_notification topic

Use the same email (SMTP) details as you used in the Chapter 4 exercises. The other fields should be as follows:

Email To:

Email CC:

Email Subject: Schedule Failed

Email Template:

3. Create Schedule

Return to the Schedules dialogs. Create a new schedule with a name and category of your choosing. Select the Samples repository and choose the workspace easyTranslator.fmw

When you select a workspace with published parameters – like this one – they will now appear in the Schedules dialog. They can therefore be set at this time.

To force this workspace to fail, we’ll deliberately set an incorrect parameter. Locate the Source File parameter and click Specify A Location. In the location field enter g:\invalidpath.shp. As this file does not exist it will cause the workspace to fail when run.

Under the Notification settings Post to Topic(s) on Failure select the topic schedule_notification.

For the schedule itself, set the Start Date to Immediately and the Repeat to Only Occur Once. We’re only testing this so there’s no need to set up a repeating one.

4. Accept Schedule

Click OK to create the schedule, which should run immediately. The job will fail – as will be confirmed on the Jobs page. You should shortly afterwards receive an email reporting the error.