Scheduling robots made simple with CRON expressions

Business processes rely on robots to run specific actions at specific times. Sometimes the scheduling requirements are complex, requiring custom code or vendor-specific schedulers, leading to hard-to-debug bugs or solutions that can not be reused in any other system.

With Robocorp Cloud and CRON expressions, one can describe even the most complex of schedules with a universal syntax that is both concise and powerful. Universal syntax means there are helpful visual editors out there for creating the expressions and that the same expression can be used with any other system that supports CRON expressions. No vendor-specific syntax, no buggy custom solutions!

Robocorp Cloud supports three types of scheduling strategies; interval, weekday, or custom.

Let’s start simple. Some robots need to run once per hour. Let’s use an interval of 60 minutes:

Some robots need to run once per week, at a specific time (Tuesday, 17:00):

But sometimes the scheduling requirements are more complicated:

At 04:05 on Wednesday and Friday in February, April, June, August, October, and December. (Europe/Helsinki time zone)

Robocorp Cloud supports scheduling using CRON expressions. These powerful, universal expressions can describe even the most complex of schedules. Here’s what the example schedule looks like as a CRON expression:

5 4 * 2,4,6,8,10,12 3,5

Here’s how this looks like in Robocorp Cloud: 

Ok. That is really short and powerful. But how do I learn this way of expressing schedules? 🤔

Go to https://crontab.guru/#54*_2,4,6,8,10,12_3,5 to edit the expression, or create your own. The user interface translates the CRON expression into a hu4*_2,4,6,8,10,12_3,5 to edit the expression, or create your own. The user interface translates the CRON expression into a human-readable phrase:

Robocorp Cloud supports all your robot scheduling needs, from simple to complicated. Learn more about Scheduling processes in Robocorp Cloud!