Scheduling tasks in Elvis 5 with Schedule plug-ins

Schedule plug-ins are used to automate server tasks. They are always entirely hosted in the Elvis plug-in folder, where for example action plug-ins can also be hosted on an external server.

This section contains a couple tips and tricks to get you started.

The base technology used for schedule plug-ins is Apache ANT, a task language which allows us to automate a wide variety of processes.

ANT tasks

Standard tasks

ANT provides hundreds of tasks like:

• copy, delete, rename files and folders.
• create or extract ZIP files.
• perform FTP operations
• send emails.
• perform XSL transformations.
• perform SOAP webservice requests.

Some extra tasks, like if and for-each, are available via ant-contrib.

Extra Elvis tasks

Elvis provides some extra tasks as well. Usage scenarios can be found in the existing plug-ins. These tasks are:

• saxon-xslt - performs XSLT 2.0 transformations.
• xpath - extract information from an XML file using XPath.
• soap - performs SOAP calls to webservices.
• xmlFileList - list the contents of a directory to an XML file so it can be processed using an XSL.
• tableData2Xml - convert a CSV or Excel file to an XML file for further processing with XSL.
• xml2TableData - convert an XHTML table to a CSV or Excel file.

Bundled plug-ins and code samples

The easiest way of getting insight in how plug-ins work is to review some of the bundled action plug-ins we provide with the server. There are developer code samples and ready to use plug-ins available:

• Developer plug-in samples: <Config>/plugins/samples/code_samples/schedule_plugins
• Bundled schedule plug-ins: <Config>/plugins/samples/schedule_plugins

You can see how they work and how they are configured. Feel free to use them as the starting point for your own plug-in.

There are a few simple and easy to understand samples like hello_world showing the basic possibilities of schedule plug-ins. There are also technically more advanced plug-ins like folder_import and metadata_import.

Build file

When the schedule triggers, the ANT build file is executed. This file must be available in the root of the plug-in folder and should be named ant.script.xml.

All plug-in specific properties in the plug-in configuration section - <config>...</config> are passed to the ANT build file as variables.

Development environment

The Eclipse IDE is a suitable tool for ANT development as it supports auto-complete and error highlighting for ANT build files.

Log files

When you run your plug-in, output is written to a log file, the log files are in the Elvis logs folder, grouped per plug-in.

Document history

• 1 October 2018: Renamed from 'Elvis 5 Schedule plug-ins - development'.