Scheduling tasks in Assets Server with Schedule plug-ins

Note: The use of internal plug-ins such as Scheduled plug-ins has been deprecated in Assets Server 6.73. These plug-ins should instead be implemented as an API, Webhook, or via WoodWing Connect.

Scheduled plug-ins are one of the ways of extending the functionality of Assets Server. They are always entirely hosted in the Assets Server plug-in folder — in contrast to for example Action plug-ins can also be hosted on an external server.

This article contains tips and tricks to get you started.

Manually running a Scheduled plug-in

To manually run a Scheduled plug-in, do the following;

Step 1. Access the Management console by doing one of the following:

• Access the following URL and log in using system administrator credentials (a 'Super user' account):

<Assets Server URL>/console

• In Assets, access the Avatar menu and choose Management Console.

Step 2. From the menu, choose Plugins, followed by Scheduled plugins.

Step 3. Expand the plug-in that you want to execute and click Execute plugin.

Figure: The Version Cleanup plug-in expanded on the Scheduled plug-ins page.

Resetting a blocked plug-in

Info: This feature requires Assets Server 6.64 or higher.

When a server with jobRunnerEnabled=true set is unexpectedly shut down or loses connection to the cluster, a Scheduled plug-in that was running at that time might still have status Scheduled assigned when the server is restarted. While in that state, the plug-in is locked.

To reset the plug-in so that it can be run again, click Reset plugin. The plug-in is then re-scheduled for next execution according to its configuration, any locks are removed and the plug-in can be run again manually or by schedule.

ANT tasks

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

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 Assets Server tasks

Assets Server 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.

Sample plug-ins and code samples

The easiest way of getting insight in how plug-ins work is to review some of the sample 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
• Sample 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 logs folder, grouped per plug-in.