Scheduled Actions

The Scheduled Actions module provides support for scheduling and managing Actions to be invoked in the future.

Scheduled Actions defines an Action template called "Create an action-scheduling action". An action-scheduling action (ASA) schedules some other action to occur in the future. For example, you could created an ASA to execute the 'Publish a node' action in 3 days (you might name this ASA "Publish Node in 3 days"). You could then assign this action to the (creation) transition in a workflow from the Workflow module. When a new node mananged by that workflow is created, the 'Publish a node' action will be scheduled and, three days later, the node will be published.

ASAs can be instantiated with the following options:

- Action to schedule, such as "Publish Node".

- When to schedule it, including a number and a unit, such as "2 weekdays". The unit can be seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weekdays.

- Argument Types, which specifies the type for up to four run-time arguments to the Action. This will almost always be type 1 node and types 2-4 undefined.

- Filter. This restricts the ASA only to operate on nodes with at least one of the selected vocabulary terms, doing nothing for all others.

Managing scheduled actions

Scheduled actions can be managed in two places. The administer >> actions >> scheduled actions menu displays a list of all scheduled actions in the system (with links to the affected node(s)), and each node's edit form displays a list of all scheduled actions that apply to that node.

In either list of scheduled actions, each row of the list shows which action is scheduled, when it is scheduled to occur, and when it actually did occur if it already has. It also includes a checkbox to delete the scheduled action. An action's scheduled date can be edited via the Scheduled column. Once an action is performed, the Scheduled column is no longer editable.

Executing scheduled actions

Scheduled actions are executed during the first invocation of cron.php that occurs after the action's scheduled date. Once a scheduled action is executed, its actual execution time is displayed next to its scheduled time.