APIs as Functions - Service Design - Add a Time-based Trigger

[Brian_Hesse]

We need to Chorus to be able to “self-trigger” based on a date, day, and length of time, (or other unit of measurement) to kick off a process automatically.

Examples:

• An annual activity checks that a commercial building’s insurance has been renewed as required by the contract. 60 days prior to the insurance renewal date, Chorus would kick off the process that manages the checking of that renewed insurance.
• Every 30 days an account manager needs to contact a client to see how they are doing. The trigger kicks off the process to have the call made and collect that latest data
• Every February 2, and email must go out to clients to confirm their current beneficiary(ies) asking the client to go online and check.

The end results is that our clients would have a new function that they put at a start of a process to automatically kick it off based on the time structure.

A high percentage of work that happens every year based on a “plan year end date”. It would be extremely helpful if we could schedule/trigger work based on a date.  A similar use case would also help us know if work that was supposed to come in on specific schedule like semi-monthly payroll contributions, an annual census update, or a required annual notification that should have happened but didn’t for some reason. (i.e. is this piece of BA/WT in the system for this client….no?....email the client or create a piece of work to find out why it’s missing)

[BethanyPare]

This kind of automated trigger would be very helpful in scheduled work item creation. It would make configuring timed processes significantly easier but also would make it clearer that a process is a scheduled event. I have been able to create a workaround but it is not ideal. 

My solution is to have a work item that perpetually creates a new version of itself every morning. It then checks the current date and some stats about the date (first business day of the week, 10th business day of the month) and uses that to determine what work items, if any, need to be created that day. 

Knowing how complicated my service is when it is just worried about dates on a month scale, it would be very unwieldly at an annual scale.

[doran.george]

Bethany,

I have a created a similar process.  The process work object is created with a timer.  When the timer fires (for example, at 2AM), the first step of the process work object is to recreate itself for the next day, and the next steps are to create work objects for the 'real' processing. 

This process mimic a nightly external job.

[Karen_Hunter]

Added to Product Enhancement Board BPMD-I-12

Currently, we support two start event configurations (general, message).  As part of a current research initiative, we are evaluating and prioritizing additional notation support - including the Timer trigger for a Start event which can be configured for a specific time-date or a specific cycle.