I'm working on an app, and I want it to do the following things:
1) Automatically posts on a user's wall at a specific time (say 11:00am every day)
2) Whenever a post is posted on the user's wall, it takes some action
How can I do this? Basically, how can I make it post at a specific time? How can I make this an event that's triggered? Or could I use a server to constantly loop until it's the correct time?
I'm a noob, so please post as many details as possible! For example, could I do this using Google App Engine?
Running continuously on appengine can be done with backends, but you should probably use cron to trigger tasks to be run at specific times/intervals. See "Scheduled Tasks With Cron for Python" https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/config/cron
You can setup max and min instances to 1-1 but you need to have business account to do that. https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/instances
Disadvantage is that you are billed for existing instance 24/7/365 hours (as instance is resident) and you will not scale.
Related
I have a cool flutter app which is used to track staff attendance. A user can check-in and check out when they start/stop working and the app record that event, calculate the number of hours worked and send a weekly summary to the manager of the staff expected wages. The current problem is that some staff members forget to check out (everyone is ok with check-in) so we don’t have good numbers and we need to manually change the attendance. I would like to add something to remember them to check out, and I am looking for creative ideas to do so. My objective is to make something very affordable.
So far I thought about two options:
to use geolocation and track when staff get in/out of a certain location and log it as check-in and check out
to set a timer when they start the shift and send a local notification if after xx hours they have not done the checkout
Geolocation seems to be the best because I can even automate the checkin/check out and do it in the backend but it will consme lots of resources in the client because I would need to check their location every while even when their at at home or on holiday...
The timer has some limits and still, I would need to manage background tasks that are complex as well as imprecise checkout depengin on when the notification goes out.
Do you have any suggestions on anything simple to implement?
I would suggest the second option.
A simple scheduler which would look for all the employees who are checked in for more than x number of hours and then throw a clickable notification to checkout. It would be an easy and clean solution. However, it has several limitations as an employee might leave early but checkout later.
In my opinion, Your most clean solution would be to have an RFID/NFC check which automatically registers as a user checks out from the building.
Another thing that can be done if your employees are working mostly on their computers. There can be a browser extension or a web app which will clock in the time they are working on their laptops. Once they close it they will be automatically checked out.
I have built a google actions project and published it. It has a web hook that is linked to a Google Functions with an actions sdk code behind it. Everything works fine.
However, I have noticed that there is a continuous user (with the same userId provided by the intent) that keeps access the function (guessing via the actions project). I am keeping a kind of sessions log and it keeps creating a session almost every 3-4 seconds.
Since the project is just some temporary demo of content and not really shared with the world at large, I am wondering what or who is causing this continuous access. It looks almost like some heart-beat type of check being done. Hence the question: is it something that Google does to know whether the action project is live or not? Thanks
Every 3-4 seconds seems high, but if you have published an Action that has gone through the review process Google does run a health check against it every few minutes.
I'm developing a website (using a LAMP stack) which must handle many user-made scheduling tasks. It works as following: an user creates an event and sets a date, and others users (as many as 63) may join. A few hours before the set date, the system must email each user subscribed to that event. And that's it.
However, I have never handled scheduling, and the only tools I know (poorly) are cron and at. My plan is to create an at job for each event, which will call a script that gets all subscribers emails and mails them.
My question is: is my plan/design good? Is it scalable? Are there better options that I should be aware of?
Why a separate cron job for each event? I've done something similar thing for a newsletter with a cron job just running once per hour and if there are any newsletters to be sent it just handles them. In your case you'd have a script that runs once every hour and gets a list of users for events that happen in the desired time interval since.
It will work. As far as scalability, at the minimum make sure that the script runs in it's own process so it doesn't bog down the server unnecessarily.
Create a php-cli script perhaps?
I'm doing most of my work in Rails nowadays, and there's a wealth of background processing libraries one of them is Resque it uses the redis server to keep track of the jobs
I found a PHP clone https://github.com/chrisboulton/php-resque
Might be overkill for your use case, but give it a shot perhaps
If you would consider a proper framework that uses an application server (and not a simple webserver), Spring has a task scheduling layer that's simple to use. Scheduling jobs on the server really requires more than what a simple LAMP install can do, but I haven't used PHP in a while so maybe there's an equivalent.
Here's an article that compares some of your options.
The other day a friend suggested to play a web browser game called OGame. If you don't know it I'll tell you what it is:an rts game where you have to build things like mining factories, barracks and so on. The interesting thing that every building has a build time and you can log off while it's building because it will keep going.
Something like this I would believe is managed via dbms. I have my records where I have the end time of a costruction. How do I check when to update a building? Do I need an external application that checks every seconds what record needs to be updated? Is it possible with mysql5 to have an internal scheduler that launches a procedure on this table? And if so, is it a best practice?
I have built a similar game and I stored the construction end times (and other events to be fired) in an events table. I wrote a PHP daemon which regularly checks the events table for expired records and acts on them accordingly.
I couldn't find a way to do it in the database itself (and if I later wanted to migrate to another DB it would need rewriting). A cron'd script may overlap. A daemon can keep track of everything all the time, and output debug information if events are queuing faster than they're being processed. I also added a cron to check periodically that my daemon is still running, otherwise start it.
Creating a daemon in PHP (if you're using PHP)
Hope that helps.
I’m about to write a workflow in CRM that calls itself every day. This is a recursive workflow.
It will run on half a million entities each day and deactive the record if it was not been upodated in the past 3 days.
I’m worried about performance has anyone else done this.
I haven't personally implemented anything like this, but that's 500,000 records that are floating around in the DB that the async service has to keep track of, which is going to tax your hardware. In addition, CRM keeps track of recursive workflow instances. I don't have the exact specs in front of me, but if a workflow calls itself a set number of times within a certain timeframe, CRM will kill the workflow.
Could you just write a console app that asks the Crm Service for records that haven't been updated in three days, and then deactivate them? Run it as a scheduled task once a day, and then your CRM system doesn't have the burden of keeping track of all those running workflow instances.
EDIT: Ah, I see now you might have been thinking of one workflow that runs on all the records as opposed to workflows running on each record. benjynito's advice makes sense if you go this route, although I still think a scheduled task would be more appropriate than using workflow.
You'll want to make sure your workflow is running in non-peak hours. Assuming you have an on-premise installation you should be able to get away with that. If you're using a hosted instance, you might be worried about one organization running the workflow while another organization is using the system. Use the timeout and maybe a custom workflow activity, if necessary, to force the start time to a certain period.
I'm assuming you'll be as efficient as possible in figuring out which records to deactivate. (i.e. Query Expression would only bring back the records you'll be deactivating).
The built-in infinite loop-protection offered by CRM shouldn't kill your workflow instances. It stops after a call depth of 8, but it resets to 1 if no calls are made for an hour. So the fact that you're doing this once a day should make you OK on the recursive workflow front.