Scheduled Job Bi-Weekly

[Marcel H_]

I've been wondering for quite a while now why there is such limited choices on the Scheduled Jobs in the system when it comes to the Run (run_type) field. I'm sure most people that work with the system regularly know what I'm talking about. We get Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Periodically, Once and On Demand. Why aren't there more choices available to those of us are working as admins and being asked to generate things in the system or send reports on bi-weekly, quarterly and yearly periods? It's rare that I'm asked to schedule something that matches up with the available options.

I'm running into this again now, where I really need to schedule something bi-weekly, to create a Request for routine maintenance. I know that I can do a Periodically and set it to 14 days, but if I want to do something more complex like bi-weekly on Wednesdays I have to write conditional scripts to do so. I'm not exactly a scripting wizard, and searches of the community forums and other articles doesn't yield much of value, and many wiki articles are written in such a way that unless you have some decent scripting experience they make some leaps in logic that aren't always easy to follow.

Is there not a way in the system that we can define our own intervals using other properties in the system? I've always wondered in reports where it pulls the information shown below, and how the system knows what these time periods are. Are they scripts that calculate? Can we see them somewhere?

[rgm276]

unless I misunderstand the question, if you create a schedule that starts on a Wed and set it to repeat every 14 days, that does not require any scripting

then just tie this schedule to any job that needs to run every other wed (i.e. 4-5-2017 is a wed, so every 14 days is another wed).

[Valor1]

Marcel,

I know exactly what you're talking about and it's super annoying.

The best solution I've come up with is to create a daily repeating job, then have the conditional check a Schedule (like Rob mentions above), an external table ("does an entry exist for today?"), or some other reference like "are there maintenance contracts expiring in the next 30 days?"

I've built my own system a couple of times to do the above. One such example (before fiscal calendar support) was for a food service client -- they have a 13 period standard calendar, and repeating actions needed to happen every period, "quarter" and year.

To answer your final muse, as of I think the Dublin release, all of those "period" options in the filter that you've screen-shotted were hard-coded.. go figure. I doubt that's changed (and if it has, I don't know about it). For years I've wanted to disable/change that list.