Add ability for schedule to repeat every Month

You can actually do this already.... The FME Server scheduler offers the option to use CRON expression for scheduling job runs. If you're not familiar with CRON - it's a way of specifying task schedules that harks back to the command line days from Unix systems.and provides an extremely powerful method for defining complex scheduling rules. More information on Cron formats can be found with a quick Google search but here are two resources:

https://crontab.guru/

https://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference

Hope that helps...

Nic

As Nic says scheduling has long been a part of FME Server, and it's easy to do. There's a guide here:

https://knowledge.safe.com/articles/22724/schedule-a-workspace-to-run-with-fme-server.html

Crontab is great - after Raspberry Pi and similar. However it is a kind of geeky user knowledge like RegEx, XML, JSON and similar, an average user usually don't know it.

Users usually turn to me for CRON when they need monthly schedule. (Weekly is all right, 7 days or multiply of 7 days)

So the Month option in the dropdown is a real requirement.

In FME Server 2019.2 and newer, the Schedules feature has been updated with a new "Basic" Schedule Type where you are able to specify a monthly recurrence – no CRON!

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I've just revisited this thread as I'm migrating some FME Server schedules from a 2017 instance to a 2019.1 instance. The old FME Server 2017 used to have a "Monthly" option for intervals but that got dropped somewhere along the line and is no longer available in 2019.1. Luckily, I noticed that the interval was missing but there was no error reported and this could have gone unnoticed until the job failed to run as expected. Not great.

I'll create a CRON schedule instead but took a look at the new "Basic" option in 2019.2+ just so I understand where things are headed. Two comments on this:

1. I haven't tried migrating a 2017 schedule to 2019.2 but expect the monthly interval schedule would still get quietly dropped and fail to run as "Basic" is a different schedule type.
2. While the new Basic scheduling gives some interesting options it's not nearly as intuitive as simply providing Monthly and Yearly options for the Interval schedule type as was previously available in 2017. It would be nice if these options could be reinstated.

Hi @nic_ran,

The Monthly/Yearly options for the Repeat on Interval Schedule Type were removed in 2018.1, with the reasoning that these were actually using an average month/year duration which could result in unexpected behaviour.

For example with monthly, the month length varies from 28 to 31 days so the average length is 30.x days. Therefore if you had set your Schedule up to start on 31 January, it would actually skip the month of February entirely and not run until March, which is likely not what the user would expect from the term 'monthly'.

Therefore to ensure the user was getting their desired outcome the preferred method was for them to use CRON. In 2019.2 the introduction of the Basic type provided a more sophisticated approach allowing the schedule to be set to the same date or day each month, hence accounting for changing month duration.

As for migrating existing Monthly or Yearly Schedules to a newer FME Server we do not change change these in anyway and they should continue to run as expected. After a Restore or Project Import you'll see that on the Schedules home page the Recurrence for these still says 'Once a Month/Year'. However if you choose to edit these, since the Month/Year option is no longer available in the Web GUI, you would then need to re-configure these to use one of the other schedule types.

I do not think the current migration process is very clean or user friendly, and have filed a series of issues to start a discussion internally as to how we can make some improvements here. I have linked this Community thread to those and will update you if a decision is made to implement any changes here.

Hi Holly,

thanks for the detailed feedback. It's very helpful to understand the reasoning behind some of the decisions made for changes and I now understand why the month/year options were removed.

I had noticed that the Schedules home page still listed the job as being run monthly but, with no option for monthly in the configuration, was not sure what would happen. Some documentation around this would have been helpful (maybe it exists but I didn't see it).

Great to hear that you're pushing for discussions around this and I'll look forward to a new and improved interface/documentation in time. :)

Nic