watchDirectory Help > Creating New Tasks > Scheduler (Pro)
Scheduler (Pro)
Previous Topic
The Scheduler is only available in the Professional edition of watchDirectory.
Start task immediately
This disables the scheduler, and is the only option you can select if you use the standard edition of watchDirectory.
Tasks are started immediately for the selected filesystem events.
Delay starting the task
Using this selection, you can delay starting the task by a fixed number of seconds, minutes, hours or days. If you are configuring the
"automatically delete files" plugin, you could use this option to remove new files 30 days after they are created.
Only run tasks on these days
When this option is selected, your task will only run on the selected days (Wednesday on the screen shot).
You also have the choice if you want to allow this task to run "all day", or just a selected period during the selected days.
The screen shot shows 2 time periods when the task is allowed to start.
Finally you need to tell what should happen with file system events outside the allowed periods. When you check the option
"Events outside these periods are ignored", your task will not start for file system events that occur
outside the selected periods.
When this option isn't checked, your task will be delayed until an allowed period is reached.
Force Schedule
When this option is selected, watchDirectory will never start the task outside the scheduled period(s).
If this option is not selected, watchDirectory could in some circumstances start events outside the scheduled periods.
Example, you configured the task to only run between 10:00am and 10:01am.
At 09:00 2 new files are created (File1.txt and File2.txt), watchDirectory schedules both files to be processed at 10:00am.
At 10:00, watchDirectory starts your task for File1.txt. The file is processed by the plugin (for example, uploaded to your FTP server),
and at 10:05 processing for File1.txt is ready.
If you have the "Force Schedule" option selected, watchDirectory will delay the processing of File2.txt until the next allowed period.
If "Force Schedule" is not selected, watchDirectory will start processing File2.txt, ignoring the 10:00am - 10:01am schedule.
Merge tasks
When tasks are delayed by the scheduler, you may want to ignore certain events that happen to a file
that is already in the scheduler database. For example, an event is present for the new file C:\Hello.txt, and now
someone changes that file. If this option is checked, the "changed file" event will not be entered into the scheduler
database.
When merging, update the scheduled date/time
If you have "merging" enabled, this option will update the time the task will start to the time of the new event.