Overview
Scheduler is a powerful feature in Zoho Creator that allows the application owner to create timed actions without any user input. These timed actions can be executed periodically based on the date and time values present in your form or on fixed date and time. For example,
- Send automated emails
- Email data of the view as attachments
- Schedule Web API tasks such as geturl and posturl
- Schedule based on date fields in your form like Birth date, Appointments, Project Deadline etc.
Types of Schedule
Zoho Creator supports three types of schedules.
- Form Schedule
Form schedules are events that are scheduled based on a date/time field in your form. (i.e) you will be able to specify a field in the form, whose value will be taken as the scheduling due date (or as start date and end date) in case of schedules with repeats like 'monthly' or 'yearly'. For example, - Consider a "Contact Form" with DOB field for each contact. You can schedule a birthday reminder mail for all the entries in the contact form by configuring a schedule with the DOB field as the 'start date' with a repeat configuration of 'yearly' and write the birthday wishes to be sent using the Send Mail task. Also you have to option to apply criteria for the data so that only some records are chosen for scheduling.
- Consider an 'Appointment' form with a date-time field named 'Due time'. You can schedule a generic reminder that reminds you 2 hour before every appointment. Execute event 2 hours before Appointment.DueTime
All tasks supported in Deluge Scripting can be configured as Form schedule events. For example, send mail, fetch and update records, add records, delete records etc. The events can be configured using drag-n-drop script builder or free-flow scripting option. - Report Schedule
Report schedules are events scheduled based on a view in your ZC application. (i.e) you can send your view data as reports by specifying fixed date and time with repeats like 'monthly' or 'yearly'. The view data can be sent as an attachment in the send mail task. Only the Send Mail task can be configured as action in "View Subscription" schedule. For example, consider a "Sales Database" application with a "Monthly Sales View". You can configure a schedule to send the "Monthly Sales View" to the respective Sales managers on a "monthly" basis. - Custom Schedule
Custom Schedules are events/actions scheduled by specifying fixed dates and time with repeats. This will be mostly useful for tasks like sending monthly reports, deleting previous month's records at the start of every month, sending meeting reminders every monday etc. For example, - Execute event every day at 9:30
- Execute event every Monday at 9:30
- Execute event 6th of every month at 9:30
- Execute event 5th of every September at 9:30
All tasks supported in Deluge Scripting can be configured as Custom schedule event/action. For example, send mail, fetch and update records, add records, delete records etc. The events can be configured using drag-n-drop script builder or free-flow scripting option.
Configuring Schedules
