Jobs overview
Learn about jobs in Actioner and how to configure them.
Jobs in Actioner enable you to automate your tasks that manage work that is one-time or on a recurring basis. You can use jobs in an infinite number of different use cases.
Setting a job on a schedule eliminates the need to remember to run an action or a workflow with a deadline, freeing time to focus on work. You can use them to remind your team about due dates in advance, such as a yearly reminder to generate revenue reports a few weeks before the end of the financial year or a quarterly reminder to write down peer reviews.
Configuring a job on a recurring basis enables you to automate your actions or workflows that is repetitive in nature. To supercharge your team's productivity, you can use reminders for your team to share their weekly or daily updates in a channel. This will help everyone stay in touch with what everyone on your team has been up to.
Examples of when to use one-time jobs
- Remind your customer support team to update their tickets 20 minutes before breaching SLA.
- Notify your sales team to log their notes into your CRM 1 hour after finishing their meetings with customers.
- Many of your email campaigns may be useful as one-time messages to recipients, such as a promotion for a new product line. You can start your email campaign to be sent to your subscribers only once at a future date and time you select.
- Send a series of introduction messages to your customers right after they signup to your product. You can schedule when to send these messages, such as first message to be delivered right immediately, and second one in 1 hour, 1 day or 1 week after they signup to your product or visit a specific page in your application.
Examples of when to use repetitive jobs
- Create a recurring task to remind you and your team to participate in meetings that are conducted on a regular basis. You probably have standup meetings daily or at least weekly with your team. When you’re too busy working, recurring notifications in Slack help you not to miss any of them.
- Add a repetitive job to get the status reports on your customer base or performance of your team on a weekly basis. These reminders keep you aware and stakeholders informed.
- As a social media consultant, you have a growing list of clients for whom you write and post articles on a weekly basis. In addition, you manually run a monthly engagement report for each client. You can use jobs to remind you about writing and posting articles on every Monday until the contract of your client expires. You can add another job to be run on a monthly basis, reminding you to run monthly engagement reports - or even automatically run the reports and share the results in your prefered Slack channel.
How jobs work
Every job in Actioner triggers a task that runs one-time or runs on a recurring basis.
One-time tasks are refered as Scheduled jobs. Tasks that are performed on a recurring basis are Recurring jobs
Tasks are the actions or workflows in your app. You can setup a job to run either a workflow or an action.
Job types
Every job in Actioner triggers a workflow or an action one-time or on a recurring basis. Depending on the frequency of how you want to run your action or workflow, you can setup a scheduled job or a recurring job.
Scheduled jobs: are the actions or workflows that are run only once at the date and time you specified. You can use them to remind important deadlines.
Recurring jobs: are the actions or workflows that run on a recurring basis. You can use them to remind repetitive tasks that take place daily, weekly or monthly.
Working with jobs
Jobs are managed on app level. It means that,
- A job added to your app can only run an action or a workflow in that app.
- You can use job requests to dynamically add, update or remove scheduled tasks in your actions.
- Scheduled jobs are deleted right after they run the selected task at the scheduled time.
- Recurring jobs are deleted right after they run the last occurrence.
Jobs tab
To see the jobs in your app or create new ones, navigate to your app on My apps page and go to Jobs tab.
App users (users with the right to run the actions of that app) can view the jobs. Only app admins can create new jobs or update the existing ones.
Creating a job
On Jobs tab of your app, click + Add job.
Select job type. Available types are recurring, and scheduled.
- If you are adding a recurring job, fill out Recurrence time fields.
If you are adding a scheduled job, fill out Scheduled time fields.
Give a name to your job.
Select what your job will do on Task field. You can select between actions and workflows added to your app.
- If you select a workflow, you are required to enter a payload to continue. You can provide the payload that will trigger the workflow you selected.
- If you select an action, the input parameters of your action open up. Enter values for the inputs to proceed.
- Once all is set, click Add to create your job.
Recurrence time fields for a recurring job
- On Starts at fields, select the date, the time and the timezone that your job will start.
Your job will be run on the selected date and time according to the selected timezone. By default, your browser's timezone is selected.
Select Frequency. You can select your job to be run
- Daily, at the selected time
- On every weekday (Monday to Friday), at the selected time.
- Weekly, at the selected time
- Monthly, at the selected time
- Yearly, at the selected time
On Ends field, select if and when your job will stop running.
- Never: When selected, your job never stops running.
- After a specific date: When selected, your job runs until the selected end date.
- After a number of occurrence: When selected, your job runs after it runs the selected Occurrence count times.
Recurring jobs have a limit of max 100 occurrences.
Scheduled time fields for a scheduled job
Select the date, the time and the timezone that your job will run. By default, your browser's timezone is selected.
Your job will be run on the selected date and time according to the selected timezone. By default, your browser's timezone is selected.
Editing jobs
To edit a job, click ellipsis … at top right corner of your job and select Edit.
Deleting jobs
To delete a job, click ellipsis … at top right corner of your job and select Delete.
