As we are getting closer version 5 we are thinking of making some changes. Most of these changes are concerning the structure of different objects within VisualCron. This will in turn, affect VisualCron API users. The goal is to simplify and unify objects like properties and classes. We also want to correct things that was not designed the best way, for both us, ordinary users and VisualCron API users.

The idea of this topic is to present our vision of changes and get your feedback. We start by posting a list - in no particular order and hope for your feedback. This list does not say we are definitely going to do the change but we are thinking about it and are open for discussions.

1. Many thoughts are concerning Notifications. Basically, a Notification is a Task with some simple conditions. The problem with Notifications as it is now is that we have to spend time on maintaining both Tasks and Notifications. For example the Email Task and Notification - which is simplified in the Notification. We are thinking about moving all Notifications which not exist as Tasks to own Tasks. Then let you choose a NotificationTask instead of existing Notification.

2. Also concerning Notifications. Currently Notifications have 3 simple conditions. When Job has started, On error, On complete. Do we need more simple predefined conditions? Which?

3. Implementation of file filter. Everywhere we specify a file there will also be some filters based on size, date, content, attributes. We are thinking of adding these filters. Please let us know if you can think of/need more:

# file name filter
* File name inclusion mask - "*?" etc or RegEx
* File name exclusion mask - "*?" etc or RegEx
* Case sensitivity

# file content match
File content in text files - "?*" or RegEx match

# date modified or created filter ( do you need AND? )
* NewerThanDate x - specified date or variable
* OlderThanDate x - specified date or variable

# file size
* larger or smaller than x size

# file attributes
* including a list of attributes
* excluding a list of attributes

4. Folder name of installation will probably be changed from VisualCron 4 to just VisualCron

5. Service name will probably be changed from VisualCron4 to VisualCron

6. SQL connection string will moved into global Connections for reuse

This list will probably grow but please, if you have used the API or have comments on fundamental changes then please reply to this post. If you are requesting new Tasks or features then please post them as usual in "Feature requests". Try to stick to breaking changes here as we would like to do all of them at once when we are moving to new version.

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Please don’t make Notifications a task. Leave it as tab in task/job options. Allow attachments to notifications


Highly Recommended Adds:

Please make an option for global/locals(job-specific) conditions
Restart option if the job fails, time to wait and # of retries


Thank You

I like the file filter. On many occasions I need to move all files EXCEPT the one that was created today, or the one that is very large. Something like this could help accomplish this task. Allowing for a bit of logic involved in file operations might be able to go hand in hand with this

changing around the Notifications sound like a decent idea, but I would not like to lose the ability to have them as part of the task. It makes things simple and easy to configure. It sounds like it would still meet our needs the way you are proposing, but as far as we are concerned, they work well as is.

I would like to see a loop function. Especially with deleting files and deciding what to do on error (retry #, skip, task failed).

Just started using Visual Cron to replace Windows scheduled tasks and a lot of jobs with schedules in SQL Server, but here are some ideas based on my very limited (one day) of using VC to set up replacement jobs:

1. Add a custom time selection for running a task every "X" minutes between "Start Time" and "End Time". Let me pick the weekdays to do this as well.
2. Give me a way to group jobs. I realize I can add related tasks under a job, but not if they run on different schedules. There's no way I could see to schedule a task, only a job, so unless I missed something I need a way to group related tasks that are separate only because of scheduling, at the job level. Hope that makes sense. Or maybe the better way to resolve this is to allow tasks to inherit a job's schedule by default, but give me a way to override the schedule at the task level.
3. I'd love to be able to drag/drop tasks from one job to another, right in the grid. Edit: sort of found that capability with context menu clone command. This is probably me being new to VC, but job/task organization and visibility is a big reason we're switching to VC. We want to be able to clearly see what is running when. Add being able to see the next run time and dependencies on the grid as well (for tasks).
4. I probably need to spend more time with the manual so take this one as you will, but dependencies seem a bit convoluted to me. If all I want is to order a list of tasks and not allow one to start until the previous is complete, that should be a simple setup. (And maybe it is - back to the manual for me!) Edit: It is simple, my mistake for making a lot more complicated than just checking "run tasks in order".
5. It would be nice to see the next scheduled run time, even when the job is deactivated. I know that's an oxymoron as the job won't run, but it's still nice when you make a schedule change to see when VC would run the job if it was activated. (And I may not want to risk the job running by activating it to see the next run time.)
6. Would love a way to clone tasks. Edit: Found that too!

I'll most likely edit this list as I work on replacing all the jobs we have scattered on machines all over the domain, but so far, I really like the capabilities.

Oh, and a global setting for the DB connection string is a fantastic idea. I could use that right now.

Geoff

I would love the change to notification. If you have many notifications, the current setup can be confusing where they are "global"

Custom commands in SFTP would be great.

I concur on the run every x minutes between 8 and 17 on weekdays type of schedule (but it's not high on my list), could be a "wizard" that transforms it into the current format.

The filefilter is a must for me.

Unsure if Append on Archive is the same as Update (when using zip), but an Update feature would be great.

Perhaps a email trigger (checking a mailbox on exchange for me would do the trick)

I would like to see a grouping method of jobs. I have it also as a feature request in this forum, but the change to implement this is hugde I think, so that's why I post it here also.

This is the link to this topic .

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The notifications change suggested sounds like a great idea, it would definitely simplify the structure of the application.

I've previously posted a suggestion on adding user defined variable and allowing access to credentials via variables as well (see http://www.visualcron.co...lt.aspx?g=posts&t=64  )

Reaction to point 1)

Moving the non exsiting notifications to tasks, do you mean they will disappear in the notification list?
Does this mean the notification methods are limited?

The NotificationTask will than be a normal task in the job if I understand correctly.

The strength of having a notification on a job is that is can generates a notification when needed. When it is in a job as a normal task, it will be run everytime the job runs. Do we need to setup conditions for this notification task?

Or can we still use the notifications on a job like now?

:-s

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Yes, I wanted to clarify that for you, Vladimir and everyone else.

I see two alternatives:

1. We move existing Notifications into Tasks. Then change Notifications so you can "globalize" a Task instead. The new breed will be a "NotificationTask".

2. We add support for running Tasks from Notification.

Problem with 1. is that it takes time to move existing Notifications to Tasks, on the other hand, these "new" Tasks may come in hand for some one.

Problem with 2. is that it may be confusing and I don't know how it will actually look.

Either way, if we implement it, it should be transparent for the end User. Notifications will still exist in some way.

I think we should focus on when Notifications are called. For example, is it enough with the 3 events that exist now, or? Or should there be more Job or Task events?

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We use the Email Task a lot and would like to be able to choose between sending one email to all recipients or sending an individual email to each recipient. I don't think your comments on notifications are implying that the Email Task would go away, but just in case please don't get rid of the Email Task.

For the most part, we use notifications (primarily email notifications) at the task level. Most the the jobs we run consist of a list of tasks that are run in order but are not dependent on each other (the same task running on multiple servers, things like that). We like the simplicity of being able to setup the notification right on the task, but that is probably influenced by the fact that we have a short list (about 10) of global email notifications using parameters from the task and job. We send out an email notification on failure in most tasks and an email notification on completion for some jobs, so in our case we don't need any additional triggering events for notifications. I wouldn't like to have to add in a separate notification task for each existing task, doubling the size of the list of tasks for a job.

The proposed implementation of file filtering would be awesome. We are currently running some scripts from Visual Cron for exactly those purposes, so being able to move those pieces into Visual Cron tasks would be a major improvement.

I am some what new to Visual CRON and it may have some of the following requests.

1. Can you add some reporting?
2. When the service is restarted that is would not remove the log entries for the show log screen.
3. If it would be able to kick off an EXE on a remote machine and execute on the remote machine.
4. A calendar screen that would show when jobs are scheduled to run.

I am some what new to Visual CRON and it may have some of the following requests.

1. Can you add some reporting?
2. When the service is restarted that is would not remove the log entries for the show log screen.
3. If it would be able to kick off an EXE on a remote machine and execute on the remote machine.
4. A calendar screen that would show when jobs are scheduled to run.

Please divide the questions to keep this post clean.

1. For reporting, please comment this  post.
2. Is that a question? Please enter this in a new post.
3. You can, there is a Remote Execute Task.
4. Please post this in a new post with all details so a discussion can start there

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To the VC Team.
First, the current interface & depth of features in VC4 are awesome, and save my company lots of time.
Since you are looking for ideas for VC5, here is something I could use...

A Job "Dashboard" and some Job Reports. The dashboard would contain a summary of completed, pending, and failed jobs.
If you want to get fancy, you could show running jobs, and average times for completion, a selectable date range, etc.
If you want to get really fancy, this "Dashboard" could post to an IIS web page, or to the VC client.
Also, you could add Job "Groups", which could show the stats at a higher level.
Over time, we keep adding more and more jobs, so we are scrolling up and down to get the status.

I understand this may be a lot of work, but then, maybe you could sell VC and VC Professional.
I still don't understand how you have such good maintenance and support, and not charge for upgrades.
I will continue to recommend VC to all my admin friends.
Keep all those new features comming... we love them.
Paul.

I'd like to see the following:

1. A Category field added to the job level so that I can group my job together (currently using description, but then I lose that field)
2. A Notes field on each Job and then on every Task - doesn't need to be long - maybe 500-1000 characters. I can put information in there on what the job/task does, what configuration file(s) are needed/etc.
3. Searchable Help file for the API
4. A little more verbose documentation on the API as to what each piece of data does and why. I'm trying to put something together that will go through and dump out a list of jobs and their schedules in a format like this: "Runs @ 7:30am, 9:30am, 12:30pm, 4:30pm, 10:30pm" or "Every day @ 4:30am". The interval thing I think I have down, it's getting all of the rest that's rather confusing. I'd like to know what columns to ignore in different scenarios. For instance - as I write this, I have several jobs scheduled to run on an interval basis. When looking at all of the columns for TTime - I find that the Months field has a single value with June in it. To me this is saying that it's going to run in June - but it has nothing to do with the Interval configuration.
5. A way to save the output of a task to a specified file (with var options to do things like put in datetime/path/etc into file name). This could be a checkbox (Save Output and then if checked - you specify the filename).

Greetings,

Many of the features we'd like to see have been covered but to help with the cause - here they are:

1 - Reporting - basic reporting on job statistics - # of successes, # of failures, average run time. An export of the job/task log data would be fine as well - excel can do the reporting.
2 - Calendaring - ability to see a calendar with the scheduled jobs. We have a growing number of jobs on each server, probably near 100, and it is important to see the overlapping schedule to better manage system resources
3 - Cross server views - ability to view jobs for more than 1 server at a time.
4 - When changing a job, keep past statistics - today the stats get overwritten when a job is changed

VisualCron is a great product and we enjoy using it. Any of these items would make it even better.

In the past we used Opalis four our scheduled tasks, but it had too much bugs and bad support. What I did like was the way they build their jobs.

Here you see an example of a job. All the icons are tasks and the connection lines between have conditions. So to move over the line to the next task, you have to match the condition given to the line. The conditions to choose from depends on the previous task. The nice thing is here that you can split your job in multiple way's.

For example: If only one file if found, go left, with two files, go right and more than two do nothing. All done with multiple conditions on task results.

This GUI is very, very different than the current one. I just want to point out the good things like a easy overview of the dataflow even for people who are only starting jobs and the easyness of setting conditions at task level.

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Indeed, this would be nice. And we have thought about this. It is mainly about priority. But we will investigate this more.

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2. Also concerning Notifications. Currently Notifications have 3 simple conditions. When Job has started, On error, On complete. Do we need more simple predefined conditions? Which?

It would be nice to be able to Notify warnings. For platforms that natively show warnings (i.e. SQL Server warnings), that is straight forward. For jobs just as running a plain .EXE, it would be nice to specify that a list or range of exit codes should be treated as "warning", not "error".

About the SSIS Package task --

It looks like that task is calling dtexec with the default "EWP" (error, warning, progress) value for the "/Reporting" flag. It would be nice to be able to specify this flag (as well as the "/Logging" flag). In the very least, the default should be "EW" so as not to include the 'scrolling blindness' from the P flag. In fact, since the Output only stores the first chunk of stderr, most errors and warnings never actually show up when we double-click on the task Output cell.

For the time being, I have had to resort to running DTEXEC via the plain old .EXE task, not the SSIS Package task.

I hope you find this suggestion worthwhile.

Regards,
Alan.

All I need is the ability to continue from an Execute task when the application is "ready for input", as opposed to only when the application exits.

eg. I have 3 windowed server apps that I need to start and run(for the day) at the same time each day. Currently I can't do this with one job, since the first execute task never completes.

I would like to see a grouping method of jobs. I have it also as a feature request in this forum, but the change to implement this is hugde I think, so that's why I post it here also.

This is the link to this topic .

Thanks for programming this feature!

Regards
Erik

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I don't want to lose notifications as a component of a task/job, but if the notification tab is changed to a "post-task" tab with it's own conditions, then this could be a huge improvement. Not only could you convert notifications to a task type, but other task types could also be run as a post-task based on the results of the base task/job. It will be important to include the same condition capabilities that currently exist for notifications and it will be important to have the option of globalizing the post-task.

As a related feature request, I would like to have an additional condition option to check the value of a variable (is equal | is not equal | exists | does not exist) and use this to determine if a task/job (post-task too 🙂 should run.