More Control on Scheduled Tasks

When using scheduled tasks, it would be great to see in real time (preferred) or at the end of the process a table listing the records that have been updated/generated, so that you can quickly and easily see if your desired changes have actually materialised. Also the facility to stop or pause the update would be handy if you know you´ve made a mistake. This would be especially beneficial when working with large quantities of records given the time it sometimes takes per record to update depending on the complexity of the task.

Additionally, regarding the task button in the builder, it would be amazing to be able to provide builder-end customisation and options for the front end user, so, for example, generate a trimester report for all active students for the selected trimester (Trimester 2)…If the user could choose what to create (which trimester)…and do it when they want.

With the actual scheduling side, it would be beneficial if we could schedule tasks to run on specific dates as opposed to only having the “recurring” option.

Also, would be nice to not set to “active and recurring” and still have the ability to trigger the task from the from end button (Currently the only way around this is to set the task to active with a start date in the distant future… 2050 :wink:

Lastly, I see no facility to delete records or connected records in large quantities on an automatic scheduled basis (or manually triggered event). I imagine the only way would be a complex filter string within a pipe. However, a scheduled Task or Task (manually initiated) record removal facility may be interesting…with a “Recycle bin” system for recovery…as personally, I´m highly likely to delete the wrong records by accident…hahaha

Anyway, anyone that is in agreement with any of the above please like and comment as this has been recommended to be the best way for getting improvements!!!

Thanks in Advance!

Ashley Williams

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Great point. For now, how about adding a special field that gets updated with each task. For example, a field called “Last Task Update” and set this field value in the task.

I agree 100% we are indeed working on this.

I’m not sure how your app is configured, but if Trimesters is a connection field, if you add the Task inside the Trimesters details page you can likely achieve this. I do get what you mean, and not sure if this would be possible in the very near future. Our tasks aren’t really built like this at this time.

This too I agree with. One day the whole scheduling part needs to be rebuilt using RRULE which allow setting rules to run on “every 5 weeks on Monday, Friday until January 31, 2022.” I wish we had done this to begin with, but mistakenly hadn’t. It’s never too late though.

You bring up a good point and that’s precisely why tasks don’t have the delete option yet. But, you touched upon a solution which is Soft Delete. Basically, add a column called “Deleted_at” and update this column in task when you want to delete a record. Then you can use API or some other method to delete all records that deleted_at is not blank or older than x days.

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Great feedback once again! Thank you for taking the time to respond!!!