Learning Objectives

After completing this lesson, you’ll be able to:

What is Scheduling?

Scheduling is the ability to configure 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 the web interface. They can be accessed through a button on the main menu:

Finding Schedules in the FME Server menu

The interface supports all the capabilities you would expect, including the ability to create, remove, duplicate, trigger, enable and disable tasks:

Schedules list table

Note

In FME Server, there are two ways to schedule jobs. Scheduling from this Schedules page is one way to do this, but you can also create a scheduled process within Automations.

Creating a schedule through this page lets you set up a single workspace to run at a specified interval. This is ideal for simple scenarios.

Creating a schedule inside an Automation allows you to trigger multiple workspaces to run in one place and provides many more tools for controlling exactly what will happen when that schedule kicks off. We'll look at this in more detail later in this Learning Path.

The Show Automations button lets the user see which automations are running on a schedule.Viewing automations running on a schedule

Note

In 2022.0 and newer, the Filter button on the Schedules page is now a slide-down panel located above the +New and Actions buttons.

Creating a Scheduled Task

You can set several parameters when creating a scheduled task.

The first group of parameters includes options for naming and describing the schedule and setting up the actual schedule. Here the user has set the workspace to run once a day starting on the 22nd of June at 2:00 pm (14:00).

Creating a schedule

Note

If you are creating a quick schedule that runs daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, the Basic Schedule Type allows you to set that up quickly.

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

The parameter labeled Skip if Job in Progress provides the ability to prevent the next scheduled run of a job from being submitted if the previous run is still incomplete.

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:

Viewing published workspace parameters

Finally, there are advanced options to control job queue and job expiry (for jobs that are time-sensitive and would be no longer useful if held back past a particular time by higher priority tasks).

Once the parameters are set for a scheduled task, it is added to the main Schedules interface, where it can be easily enabled or disabled.