Manage scheduled tasks
Overview
In Sitefinity CMS scheduled tasks are used to execute a predefined set of operations at a particular point in time. You can, for example, schedule a news item to be published at a particular date and time or schedule a site sync operation.
You can also create custom scheduled tasks, for example, using Sitefinity CMS event system to postpone the execution of heavy operations.
Sitefinity CMS has a page where you can view all scheduled tasks that are in progress, stopped, pending, or failed and take respective actions.
PREREQUISITES: To access the Scheduled tasks page, you must have administrative permissions.
Scheduled task page
To access the page with the list of all scheduled tasks, navigate to Administration » Scheduled tasks.
A list of all scheduled tasks in your Sitefinity CMS instance appears:
- The list contains failed, stopped, started, and pending tasks.
- All completed tasks do not appear – they can be found in the
Trace.log.
- The list contains system tasks, as well as custom scheduled tasks that you create.
For more information, see Scheduled tasks API.
For each task, the following information is displayed:
| Property |
Description |
Task name
|
This is the full name of the class responsible for the execution of the task
|
Item name
|
The title appears below the name. This is the user-friendly name of the task as defined in the task definition. If there is no such name defined, the title does not appear.
|
Recurrence indication
|
When a task is recurring, next to its name, the system displays Recurring (?).
If you click the question mark, the system displays the recurrence interval as a crontab expression in a tooltip.
For more information, see Generate crontab expressions.
|
Status
|
This is the status of the task. It can be one of the following:
- Pending – the execution date of the task is in the future.
- Started – the execution date of the task has been reached and the execution of the task is currently in progress.
- Stopped – the execution of the task has been explicitly stopped by the user from the relevant module.
- Failed (?) – the system executed the task, but the execution failed.
If you click the question mark, the system displays the error message as defined in the task definition.
|
Scheduled for
|
This is the scheduled execution date of the task.
|
Executed on
|
This is the date when the system attempted to execute the task.
This field is applicable only to failed, stopped, and started tasks. The tasks that are successfully executed are removed from the list.
|
NOTE: You can stop the execution of all scheduled stasks on a particular node of a load-balanced setup. For more information, see Disable the execution of scheduled tasks.
Task actions
You can access each task actions by expanding its Actions link. Depending on their status, you can perform the following actions with the scheduled tasks:
NOTE: You cannot start a stopped task and you cannot stop a started task. You must do that from the module where you have started or stopped the operation. For example, if you have stopped moving images from one library to another, to resume the operation, you must go to the Libraries module where you have stopped it
Sort tasks
By default, tasks are sorted by scheduled execution date in ascending order (by column SCHEDULED FOR). You can change that using the Sort dropdown box in the toolbar.
You can sort tasks:
- by Scheduled date - ascending
- by Execution date – ascending
- Alphabetically – ascending or descending
- by Status
Filter tasks
You can filter tasks by status, using the following filters in the right pane:
- All tasks
- Pending
- Started
- Stopped
- Failed
- Recurring
Search tasks
Searches in the task name.
You can sort the search results.