User friendly scheduling feature

Question

I'm trying to add a scheduling feature to my web scraping application that will let the user schedule scraping jobs so he can, for instance, perform a job every Monday, or every 2 hours or stuff like that.

On one end, I could make a very simple scheduler that let you pick a specific date and time and pick a time interval that would indicate how often to execute the job starting at the specified date and time. So if, for instance, I pick Dec 31 at 2:00 pm and choose 1 day as my interval, the job would run every day at 2:00 pm starting Dec 31. But what if he wants to run the job every Saturday and Sunday, or three times a day on Sundays?

On the other end, I could embed some kind of scripting language that will let the user use any logic he wants, but this would be overkill for me and for the user. He doesn't need to run a job every day of the month that is prime number or anything like that.

So this is a common sense question, not a programming one. How would you implement this, or, do you know any similar kind of scheduling job in any other kind of application? I looked at the scheduler in my antivirus but this one is extremely plain and simple.

Answer 1

Why even do this at all? The operating system already has a scheduling service built-in (e.g. cron on *nix, Task Scheduler on Windows, etc). Just provide the ability to launch your process from the command-line launch and let the operating system take care of it.

If you like, you could build a UI in your application that interfaces with the operating system's built-in mechanism to provide the most common configurations, but for anything more complicated, scheduling is basically a solved problem.

Answer 2

I would think that something like the Windows Task Scheduler model would provide enough versatility for what your users are probably going to want. This is a task where I would take a YAGNI approach. Implement something basic and straightforward that covers most scenarios and then only work to include the exceptional cases on demand.

Answer 3

I would develop a UI for the most common scenarios. Once a day at a given time may be common. Or maybe continuously on a specific interval will be more common (for example, every half an hour).

If you want to offer more flexibility, I suggest allowing CRON expressions. No need for a custom scripting, CRON is it when it comes to scheduling. To allow ultimate flexibility, simply allow multiple CRON expressions.

One major advantage of CRON expressions, is that you will almost certainly have an scheduler implementation available to you that can accept them. There is Quartz for Java, Quartz.Net, and of course the cron daemon on any unix based system. I have used Quartz.Net with great success in the manner I described (simple config for daily and interval timing, with CRON used for more expressive timing)