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Schedule Triggers

Scheduled triggers allow you to create a regular schedule to specify how often your integration should run. This is useful when you have an integration that should be triggered consistently at a specific time. You can set up your integration to run at the same time for all customers, or you can set up schedules on a per-customer basis.

To set up the same schedule for all customers, click the integration's trigger, open the Schedule input, and enter the schedule you would like your integration to follow. You can configure your integration to run every X minutes, hours, days, or weeks:

Set static integration trigger in Prismatic app

You can alternatively select Custom and provide a cron string (interpreted in UTC time). For example, a trigger of */5 8-16 * * 1-5 would cause your integration to run every five minutes during business hours (8:00-16:55), Monday through Friday. For help computing a cron schedule, see this Cron Calculator.

Setting trigger schedules from a config variable​

To configure schedules on a per-customer basis, first create a config variable of type Schedule within the config wizard designer. You can give your config variable any name you choose:

Configure integration trigger to use config variable in Prismatic app

Then, click your integration trigger and reference the Config Variable you created:

Set config variable for integration trigger in Prismatic app

When your integration deployment team later deploys an instance of your integration, they can configure a custom schedule for that instance.

Staggering schedules for customers​

If you have many customers, you may want to stagger the schedules to avoid concurrent execution constraints or prevent overwhelming your integration's target system.

To stagger schedules, you can use a string type config variable to set a schedule for each customer. If you use a code data source and mark your config variable as embedded, you can automatically generate a schedule for each customer without their intervention. This allows you to set different schedules for each customer without manually configuring each instance.

This Code Block String example shows how to set a schedule that runs every 5 minutes, but with a random offset of up to 5 minutes for each customer:

Configure each customer to run every 5 minutes with a random offset
module.exports = async () => {
  // Random integer between 0 and 4
  const randomNumber = Math.floor(Math.random() * 5);

  // Create a cron string using the random number
  // "0-59/5 * * * *" means "At every 5th minute from 0 through 59." (i.e. :00, :05, :10, :15, :20...)
  // "3-59/5 * * * *" means "At every 5th minute from 3 through 59." (i.e. :03, :08, :13, :18, :23...)
  const cronString = `${randomNumber}-59/5 * * * *`;

  return { result: cronString };
};

One customer may have a schedule of 0-59/5 * * * *, while another customer may have a schedule of 3-59/5 * * * *.

An example integration that uses the above code is available here.

Similar code snippets can be used to generate other random schedules. See Cron Guru for help with cron syntax.