About Scheduling Coldfusion Pages; Scheduling A Coldfusion Page - MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION 4.5-ADMINISTRING COLDFUSION SERVER Manual

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About Scheduling ColdFusion Pages

The ColdFusion Administrator includes a scheduling facility that allows you to
schedule the execution of ColdFusion pages and to generate static HTML pages. The
scheduling facility can be very useful for applications that do not require user
interactions or customized output. Often, ColdFusion developers use this facility to
schedule daily sales reports, corporate directories, statistical reports, and so on:
Information that is more often read than written.
Here's how it works. Instead of executing a query every time the page is requested, the
static page is served up to users containing information generated by the scheduled
event. Response time is faster since there is no database transaction, just an HTML
page.
ColdFusion allows you to schedule pages to execute on a daily, weekly, or monthly
basis. You can specify a time of day for execution, and you can schedule a page to be
run only once on a specified date.
When a scheduled page executes, a message is written to a log file,
which specifies the name of the scheduled action, the page that was executed, and
whether the page executed successfully or not. For more information about log files,
see Chapter 3, "Configuring ColdFusion Server," on page 37.

Scheduling a ColdFusion Page

The ColdFusion Administrator allows you to schedule the execution of application
pages. To access the scheduling facility, open the Administrator and click the
Scheduler button.
The scheduling facility has two parts:
Scheduler Settings page — Where you specify how often ColdFusion checks for
newly scheduled tasks.
The Scheduled Tasks page — Where you define new tasks or change existing
scheduled tasks.
There are three areas you define in scheduling an event:
1. The start/end date and interval.
2. The URL of the file you want to execute.
3. Publishing information if you want to save output to a file. This is the mechanism
you use for creating static HTML pages by processing a ColdFusion page.
Note
In the Operation list box on the Scheduled Tasks page, HTTPRequest is currently the
only operation supported. Later releases of ColdFusion may add additional operations
to this list box.
Administering ColdFusion Server
,
schedule.log