As the name suggests, Scheduled Business Rules allow a business rule to be executed automatically according to a predefined schedule rather than being triggered by an add, update or delete event in PPO.
Scheduled Business Rules are not a separate business rule type but rather an alternative trigger mechanism that can be applied to Call Web Service and Set Entity business rules. Instead of waiting for a system event to trigger the rule, PPO executes the rule automatically based on the configured schedule.
The ability to configure Scheduled Business Rules is not directly available to end users and can be requested by logging a ticket with the PPO Support Team. These rules can have a significant impact on data if configured incorrectly, and for this reason only the PPO Support Team can create or modify the schedule configuration.
Scheduled Business Rules are typically used to automate recurring business processes that need to occur at regular intervals without user intervention.
Use Case Examples:
- A scheduled rule can be used to automatically create Sprint records every week or every two weeks, depending on the organisation's sprint cadence.
- Automatically creating Resource Allocation records each year for planned Christmas closure periods, ensuring that the required allocations are created consistently without the need for manual intervention.
- Automatically activating new projects at the start of a financial year, ensuring that projects move into an active state at the appropriate time without requiring manual updates.
- Automatically burning down Leave or Public Holiday work items once the scheduled date has passed, ensuring that outstanding work items are updated without requiring manual intervention.
Schedules can be configured to run on a daily basis, on specific days of the week, days of the month, or days of the year. This flexibility allows a wide range of business requirements to be automated using one or more Scheduled Business Rules.
Unlike standard business rules, no add, update or delete action occurs to trigger the rule. When a Scheduled Business Rule executes, PPO retrieves records for the configured entity and evaluates the configured conditions and exceptions to determine which records qualify. The configured action is then performed against all qualifying records.
Conditions and exceptions are configured in the same way as standard business rules and act as filters to determine which records should be processed. However, because there is no user action or record update taking place, certain conditions are not applicable to Scheduled Business Rules.
- User Group, Field Value Changed, and New Values conditions and exceptions cannot be used.
- Old Values and Custom Conditions can still be used to identify qualifying records.
- To help prevent accidental large-scale updates or actions, Scheduled Business Rules will not execute if more than 10,000 records match the configured criteria.
Scheduled Business Rules are processed daily as part of PPO's scheduled processing activities which is generally at 1am (GMT/UTC).