Creating schedules

You can create and save schedules that you plan to reuse. If a schedule will only be used once, you can instead define it when you create the update rule.

About this task

See Scheduled updates to analyses for generic information on scheduled updates.

When you create a schedule, you must configure the interval when the schedule should be preloaded, specify when to update the analysis data, and set the active schedule period, among other settings. Preloading an analysis improves the initial loading time, as the analysis will be preloaded into the Web Player's memory and this minimizes the load time when someone opens it from a web browser. You can specify when and how often the server should check for changes in the analysis file or its underlying data, and reload the data if any changes are detected.

The steps below show how to create a saved schedule, but most steps are the same when you add a schedule from within the Rules page. When you add a schedule created specifically for a rule, you will only follow step 4 through 6 below. See Creating scheduled updates by using Spotfire Server for information about how to add scheduled updates rules.

Procedure

Log in to the Spotfire Server web administration pages and click Scheduling & Routing.
Under Scheduling & Routing in the navigation panel to the left, click Saved schedules.
On the Saved schedules page, click Create schedule.
In the Create schedule dialog, decide what you want the schedule to do.
1. Under Time zone, select the time zone for the times you will enter in the upcoming steps.
2. Under Preload analysis, select one of the options to define the interval during which you want the analysis to be preloaded.
  At the start of the specified interval, the server checks for running Web Player instances in the defined resource pool. When an instance is available, the analysis will start to load.
  
  You can choose to have the analysis preloaded Always, or specify a Weekly range, or a Daily range.
  
  When configuring a Daily range you can specify a start and end time and set a repeat interval by choosing whether to run the update every day, only on weekdays, or on specific days of the week or month.
  
  For a Weekly range, you define a start point and an end point (for example, from Monday at 09:00 to Friday at 18:00) during which the analysis remains loaded.
  It is also possible to specify that the schedule should only preload the analysis on rarer occasions. See the example Preloading an analysis during working hours below.
3. Under Update analysis data, you can specify when or how often the data in the analysis should be updated, within the interval you specified in the Preload analysis section.
  If all data is embedded and the analysis has not changed, no reload will occur.
  
  Select Never if you only want the analysis to be updated manually, at your own discretion. Alternatively, you can specify how often within the preload interval you want to update the analysis data.
  Note: Depending on your system and use cases, you might need to always show the latest possible data from a linked data source, or, you might not need more than one update a week, or similar. Remember that each update will cause a strain on the system and might affect the end users of the analysis, so do not schedule more updates than necessary.
4. Under Active, you can specify the time interval during which the schedule should be active. Outside of this interval, the schedule is not applied. If no end date is specified, the schedule applies indefinitely.
Tip: You can click Preview schedule at the bottom part of the dialog to see a list of the upcoming activities for the schedule, when using the current settings.
Type a Schedule name.
Click Add schedule to save the schedule.

Results

The new schedule is shown in the Saved schedules list. If you created a schedule within a rule, you will see it in the Schedule column on the Rules page.

Example: Preloading an analysis during working hours

To add a scheduled updates rule that keeps an analysis preloaded between 05:00 and 18:00 on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday every week, you would configure the schedule as follows:

Example: Creating an overnight schedule

Use the Daily range option with a start time at (for example) 19:00, and an end time at 03:00, to keep the file loaded during the night, and specify whether to do this on every day or on some days only.

Example: Creating a daily range schedule

Use the Daily range option with the start time 00:00 and the end time 23:59 to keep the file loaded all day, and specify whether to do this on every day or on some days only.

Example: Update the analysis data at a specific time, on specific days

If the analysis data only needs to be updated once every week, you can select the day and time under Update analysis data, choose the At the following times option, and specify your preferred time and day:

With these settings, the analysis is updated at 07:00 each Monday.

Example: Automatic conversion of schedules from previous Spotfire versions

If your Spotfire environment contains schedules and analysis update rules from a version before 14.8.0, the schedules will automatically be converted to the new format when the system is upgraded, or when previous rules are imported into an updated database (as long as the associated analysis file is present in the library before importing the rule).

In most cases, the previous schedules will work exactly the same as before, and have very similar settings, but there might be some exceptions in certain cases.

For example, if your previous schedule used the setting from the column to the left, it will be converted as follows:


Previous settings	Converts to
Repeat on these days: Mon, Tue , Wed , Thu , Fri , Sat , Sun Start loading file: 00:00 Unload file: 23:59	Preload analysis: Daily range from 00:00 to 23:59 repeated on some days of the week Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun Repeat every 1 week
Start loading file: 03:00 Unload file: 03:00	Preload analysis: Daily range from 00:00 to 23:59 Note: If the start loading and unload times are identical, the system automatically converts this to a Daily Range from 00:00 to 23:59.
Only load new data at the start of the schedule	Update analysis data: Never (only manual update)
Update with new data every: x minutes (or hours)	Update analysis data: Every x minutes (or hours)
If no start date is available	Active: Start: today's date
If no end date is available	Active: End: Never