Trigger automation to run once at a specified time

I did something once with a classic schedule. I had an existing inactive schedule that would run once 5 minutes after it was activated and I used a workbench to activate it, the schedule would then run the next workbench. That way I didn't have to deactivate anything.

Another nice thing was that I could use my first workbench to check if the schedule was already activated. This way you can run a workbench once a day even though maybe multiple people activated it. Nice for slow processes that just update a complete dataset or something like that.

The /schedules endpoint of the API supposedly offers a way to run a schedule only once at a specified time. So I guess if you put that API call in a webhook you don't need the second workspace at all.

I can’t see any API call that allows a specified time run? I looked at automations and schedules and I can only see trigger an immediate run

Like I said; supposedly (that's what the explanation says anyway). I guess you need to set start- and end-times and an interval still

What I did with my schedule is I already set it on the correct time in the schedule itself, then I just activate it with the API through what I think was an http caller. It might be good t know that this was on an old version of FME server where the capabilities of automations was still limited which is why i had to take this route.

In your case I would make the schedule with the correct time to start running with maybe a CRON statement and then set the schedule to run once. Set the schedule to inactive. Then use the automation to activate the schedule(or you can still use the way I did it with workbench->schedule->workbench method).

Edit:Oh wait i see what you mean now. You can't do it the way I wrote here. I will take a look if I can find my old schedule and workbench.

Ah, I’ve found it now, you effectively create a new schedule or amend an existing schedule with no recurrence with a begin time of when you want it to run, and an end time that is the same. I was looking for something that would trigger an existing schedule.

Moving away from schedules, so I think an api call to trigger the automation which will then shut itself off after running once is probably cleaner for me. 

Ideally, i’d want something so that i could manually trigger an automation at a future time. Just checking that something like that didn’t already exist.

I found it, do keep in mind that this is probably an old FME rest API so watch out with copy pasting.

This is an example URL: $(FMEServerURL)/fmerest/v3/schedules/$(Repository)/$(ScheduleName)

And the body of the call:

{
  "request": {
    "publishedParameters": [],
    "TMDirectives": {},
    "NMDirectives": {
      "directives": [],
      "successTopics": [],
      "failureTopics": []
    }
  },
  "workspace": "MyWorkbenchIWantToRun.fmw",
  "description": "A random description",
  "repository": $(Repository),
  "skipUntilJobComplete": false,
  "enabled": true,
  "recurrence": "none",
  "name": $(ScheduleName),
  "end": "@Value(ScheduleDateTimeRounded)",
  "interval": 30,
  "category": "A Category",
  "begin": "@Value(ScheduleDateTimeRounded)"
}

Content type is application/json.

You can set your start time the same as your end time