More advanced scheduling options..

[rlaliberte]

The scheduling options in AA are pretty good, but I really need more.

I need to be able to schedule a task to run every day, except certain days that I don't want it to run.... ie, holidays, etc when the office is not open.

Ideally I would like to provide a text file of closed dates, or a database with closed dates and have one of the steps in the daily task be to check this list to see if it should run or not.

Suggestions on how to accomplish this?

[forumsupport]

Hello,

To ensure the task does not run on specific dates you can create an excel file and store the dates on which you would NOT want the task to run. Now using the if condition command in your task you can compare the date from the excel file and accordingly stop the task if the date matches with the system date. Following is a specimen of the conditional commands that you can use.

Above to your actual task you will have to write the following commands to check the conditional scheduling.

1 Open "C:\Schedule.xls "
2 Keystrokes: [CTRL DOWN][HOME][DOWN ARROW][CTRL UP][ENTER]End[ENTER] in "Microsoft Excel - Schedule"
3 Keystrokes: [CTRL DOWN][HOME][CTRL UP] in "Microsoft Excel - Schedule"
5 Keystrokes: [F2][SHIFT DOWN][HOME][SHIFT UP] in "Microsoft Excel - Schedule"
6 Keystrokes: [CTRL DOWN]c[CTRL UP][ENTER] in "Microsoft Excel - Schedule"
7 Loop While $Clipboard$ Not Equal To "End"
8 Keystrokes: [F2][SHIFT DOWN][HOME][SHIFT UP] in "Microsoft Excel - Schedule"
9 Keystrokes: [CTRL DOWN]c[CTRL UP][ENTER] in "Microsoft Excel - Schedule"
10 If $Clipboard$ Equal To $Date$ Then
11 Stop The Current Task
12 End If
13 End Loop
14 ‘Comment: Your Actual Task Starts from here
15 Launch Website “http://google.com

Now to give you a brief explanation about this task, the above task is to ensure that whenever you start your computer the first thing it should do is open google.com website. Now we create a file Schedule.xls where you will be storing the dates on which this task should not run. But the most important point to keep in mind while storing these dates is that the date format should be exactly the same format as your system date format. For eg. dd/mm/yyyy. Now with appropriate keystrokes we copy the date in clipboard from each cell one by one and comparing it with the system date. If the date is same we would Stop the Task else the task will run.

I hope this information answers your question

[rlaliberte]

Ok.

that's one way of doing it. But I'll be honest, I'm not a big Excel fan.

I could do the same sort of thing with SQL backend, right? I realize the coding will be different, but it will be less steps as well, I think.

[Nick]

rlaliberte,

see attached file. unzip to c: drive (includes aa task and ms access database)

'aa' task will connect to ms access database and check if the task can run. (ms access doesn't need to be installed)

[rlaliberte]

Thanks Nick, I will take a look at that!