Introduction
SAP Cloud Integration version 5.45.**/6.37.**, one of the capabilities of SAP Integration Suite, comes with an enhancement for integration flow Timer flow step, where you can now configure complex and granular schedules. This blog describes how to use the advanced schedule configuration options in timer flow step.
SAP Cloud Integration version 5.45.**/6.37. ** software update is planned on mid/end of March 2023 (date and time subjected to change).
Timer Advanced option
The Timer flow step with version 1.2, you will now see an additional radio button with label Advanced.
It has been labelled as Advanced, as it provides you advanced capabilities in configuring your schedules. Below is the sample screenshot of same.
When a Timer flow step in integration flow editor is dragged-and-dropped, and Advanced radio button selected, by default, a recurring schedule of every 5 minutes would be selected as shown in the above image. You can change the configuration as per your requirements. As you can observe, the sections of this scheduling options reflects the Cron expression parts viz Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Months and Years.
Let’s see some of the advanced scheduling examples and how to achieve them.
1. Scheduling at every hour from midnight to 6 AM, with an offset of 15 minutes, IST time zone.
To configure this, you need to select the options from Hours and select 0th and 6th dropdown entries, and select 15th minute from Minutes sections. Sample images below.
2. Schedule at 5th and 20th day at 8 AM, every month, CET Time Zone
To configure this, you need to select the options from Days dropdown and select 5th and 20th day, and 8th in the Hours section, and 0th minute, 0th second from respective dropdown entries from Minutes and Seconds section respectively. Sample image below.
3. Scheduling on some specific hours, e.g., every day at 10 AM and 3 PM CET Time zone
To configure this, you need to select the options from Hours dropdown and select 10th and 15th hour. Sample screenshot below.
4. Scheduling on the last day of month, at 6 am IST
To configure this, you need to select the last day of the month entry from Days section and select 6th hour from Hours section and 0th minute, 0th second from respective dropdown entries from Minutes and Seconds section respectively. Samples images below.
Scheduling on last day of the month
5. Scheduling on 1st and 3rd Monday, every month, 4 PM IST
This configuration is not possible with single timer flow step. You need to choose two timer flow steps and you need to model your scenario accordingly. And on 1st timer, you need to select the 1st Monday in Days option and on 2nd timer you need to select the 3rd Monday, and 16th hour in Hours section. Sample images below
Above schedules for first timer step
Above schedules for second timer step
Summary
As the timer flow step now provides more advanced options to schedule in newer version of the timer flow step in SAP Cloud Integration, you can fine tune your schedules in your integration scenarios. Options to (1) directly add Cron expression and (2) allowing multiple schedules in single timer flow step, are something we have in our roadmap and will be considered for future product roadmap.
Original Article:
https://blogs.sap.com/2023/03/06/sap-integration-suite-advanced-scheduler-configuration/