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  4. Planning and starting tasks

Planning and starting tasks

This guide puts your tasks into operation: the right cadence per task, the renewal time, starting by hand and reading the result. What a task is and how scheduling and renewal time are meant is under tasks. Here are the moves.

Prerequisites

  • A channel with the tasks your connection needs.
  • For the first start: the task's transfer plan is configured, see adjusting the transfer plan.

Step by step

  1. Choose the cadence. Open the task through the Tasks navigation entry and set the Performance field in the Common section. Only the intervals the action can bear are offered. A stock task can be set faster than a product upload. The rule of thumb follows the urgency of the data: orders and stock in minutes, catalogues and prices Nightly. A new task is set to Manually and thus never runs by itself. That is the preset, not a fault.

  2. Set the renewal time where it is needed. The Renewal Time field in the same section transfers records again after the interval even when unchanged. That is a precaution for a target system that gets edited by hand. Where nobody does, leave the field empty. The details, including the separate Media Renewal Time of some tasks, are under tasks.

  3. Start by hand. Select the task in the list and click Execute. That takes effect immediately, on Manually too, and is the usual way to check a change without waiting for the schedule. On a file-based task without a data source, a dialog asks for the file first. A manual start takes along everything changed plus everything that failed last time. Whatever is unchanged it leaves alone. To genuinely transfer everything again, use Restart All in the task's traces.

  4. Read the result. The list shows the last execution per task: Started At, Stopped At, the state and since when it applies. If an execution ends with an error, the message is on the task. What happened per record is in the traces, which you find right on the task in the section below.

Checking the result

After changing the cadence the task runs by itself: Started At moves forward with every run without anybody clicking. After a manual start, check the task's traces. What the execution did is listed there per record.

Frequent pitfalls

  • Between 0:55 and 2:00 no scheduled execution starts. Nightly maintenance runs in that window, including the backup. A task due there by the cadence from step 1 catches up afterwards.
  • After an error the task waits, first five minutes, and after a day of the same error about an hour. That protects the connected system and is not a fault. A manual start from step 3 does not wait.
  • A manual start is not an "everything again". The start from step 3 takes what changed and what failed, not the unchanged rest. For that there are Restart and Restart All in the traces.
  • A renewal time set to Nightly only applies at night. The time from step 2 does not apply during the day: a manual start in the afternoon then renews nothing, and that is deliberate.
  • Order is governed by the data, not by chaining. Tasks do not know each other. What is needed as a reference has to run first: categories, manufacturers and media before the products, stock and status after them. When filling a system for the first time, start the tasks once by hand in that order, as in step 3.

Further reading