Schedule scenario run at HH:00 every hour

I’m not sure if I’m missing something super obvious, but is there a way to schedule a scenario to run every hour at HH:00 without having to wait and activate the scenario at the top of the hour?

As the scenario may break at say 10 past the hour, and it seems like I’d then need to wait until the hour is up before re-activating it again to ensure it runs every hour at HH:00.

Am I missing something really basic here on how to set up schedule runs?

No, it’s not super obvious. It has even been a requested feature for a long time.

You can create or vote for this feature.

I’m sure others would agree that this is a nice feature to have.

You can submit this suggestion to the Idea exchange, under Platform ideas and improvements.

Don’t forget to search for it first, just in case someone already suggested it, so that you don’t end up creating a duplicate.
Screenshot_2024-01-17_130153

A workaround is you can use a Make module to reschedule it to run it the next time on the hour.

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Here are some possible workarounds…

What if you schedule it to run every 40-50 minutes?
Then, the first thing it should do is figure out the number of minutes from now until top of the hour, sleep that long, then proceed with the remainder of the scenario?
This might result is the scenario run getting skipped for any given hour.

Another possibility involves creating a helper scenario.
Scenario 1 - Your existing scenario (needs to be modified, see notes below).
Scenario 2 - Helper scenario.

Scenario 2 looks like this:
On-demand schedule.
Look at the current time, figure out the top of the hour, reschedule scenario #1 to run at that time.

Alter Scenario #1 to look like this:
On-demand schedule.
At the end, call Scenario #2.

You end up creating a cycle where Scenario 1 runs Scenario 2, then Scenario 2 reschedules scenario 1.

You can use modules in the Make app to reschedule and run scenarios, but you’ll need to be on a paid plan to use them.

If you’re not on a paid plan, you might still be able to do it, but would involve some Webhooks and some heavier modifications to the scenario.

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Thanks @samliew and @Donald_Mitchell.

A workaround is you can use a Make module to reschedule it to run it the next time on the hour.

I actually tried that and it worked for the first one but then it still runs as per the previous schedule.

You end up creating a cycle where Scenario 1 runs Scenario 2, then Scenario 2 reschedules scenario 1.

Wow, that sounds quite complicated to achieve something that sounds so simple. I’m on the paid plan so I can use the Make app to run a scenario.

I think I may have a found a workaround but it only kicks in the next day. So I set the schedule to every 60 minutes and this was initially running every hour after I set it (e.g. HH:13), but then I added an Advanced Scheduling component which runs from 00:00 to 23:00:

So the scenario ran every hour at HH:13 up to 10:13pm and then started again at 00:00am. Unfortunately, it skipped the 11:00pm scenario run, so I’ll have to deal with that with a Make module to run the scenario at 11pm. Here’s what the scenarios run looked like:

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Yes I agree it should be simple, but it isn’t, so we need to vote on the feature request.

:laughing:

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So here in my “main” scenario, you can see that it is currently scheduled to run at 8:13am.

The final module is “Run Helper” which runs this, my 3-module helper:

It really doesn’t even need to be three modules, just two would work, but here’s what it does…
Figure out the next run by adding 1 hour to current time (which takes care of crossing the next month or year threshold as well), then setting the minute to :13
image

Pass that time to the Make module that reschedules my main scenario.

Finally, reactivate the scenario:

At 8:13am, the main ran, then kicked off my helper, which rescheduled and reactivated my main. Now it will run once at June 29, 2024 9:13 AM.
image

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Interesting, just to close out this conversation for now…
I let this run all day and for the most part it ran as expected, however, one run ran at :14 past the hour. The others within up to 56 seconds at :13 past the hour.