Rule chain for Cron Expression schedules

@sai_ram  @ana_g @darkknight @gunjanm   Can you help me revive this thread? I think real-time and event rules are great but they currently only support API calls and SFDC object loads. Can we get cron support for rule chains? Right now the workaround is running each rule individually off of a cron and staggering their run times. But even with this workaround, you don’t get the dependencies that are the backbone of rule chains.

Am I taking crazy pills or would this be useful?

@bradley really sorry for the inconvenience. I will try to get a quick reply on this. 

Hi @bradley  We currently do not have any short term plans around bringing Cron expression for rule chains. Cron expressions allow for one of the 2 things:

1. Flexibility
2. More frequent runs 

While providing flexibility is not a challenge per se, we would have to consider a lot of possibilities for providing a higher frequency here. 

@rakesh  Thanks for the feedback. Out of curiosity, what is the concern with frequency? As I mentioned, at least for some use cases you can cron schedule a series of rules timed to “run one after another” at a frequency already so how would adding that functionality to rule chains be any different except a vastly improved user experience? You could role it out with guardrails if there’s a concern with processing power for large chains being run more frequently, while still improving the usability of the product.

Completely agreed with Bradley here. This is a little frustrating, considering Data Designer scheduling now also supports it...consistent user experiences are unheard of across the platform at this point, and we would really like to contribute to solving this problem!

+1 lot of use case if we have this option.

Hi, @rakesh , I agree with @bradley. This functionality should be available soon in next few upgrades.

Cron rule chains helps to manage better hierarchical rules than the edged single rules. Scheduling series of rules are not achieved in regular terms of cron but rule chain aligns it when enabled. 

+1K votes.

Please involve techops to get this change worked. Thanks!

+1000 on this one. We have a Rule chain of 7 rules that are required to run sequentially that updates our entire engagment model.  We’ve had requests from our global cohorts that a more frequent update of the model (not midday as it is based on US time) would be the most ideal situation.

As noted above, Admins have the ability to schedule rules to fire at custom intervals via CRON. If a rule chain is just a logical grouping of rules, then this should not be of great concern.

If the concern is focused on backend performance taking a hit if all of us started to do this, then that might be another thing to discuss :)   

In closing, this was something we “expected” to be part of a consisten Admin interface when “scheduling things in Gainsight” since it is offered elsewhere.

+100000 to this request. The inconsistency regarding using experience across the platform is very frustrating...
To fill this gap we admins have to:
a) Clone chains, if you need to run the same chain more than once, the only way is to clone it and set each one to the required schedule (eg, twice per day every 12 hours).   
b) Have separated rules that should be chained, scheduled to run a different times.  It’s difficult to see at a glance that they are actually rules that work as a whole (eg, In my instance we have some rules that should run the 8th calendar day of the month in a certain sequence. Instead of having one chain with n rules, I have to manage this sequence via each individual schedule, “0 0 1 8 1/3 ? *”, “0 30 1 8 1/3 ? *”, etc...).

@revathimenon me again :) Can we get some PM eyes on this general topic? It’s at least a 6 year old request and would be massively useful, and it is very popular. Even if we can’t do full on cron jobs, we could take a page out of the connectors playbook and have the option to run X times per day (which I guess is sort of a GUI version of cron jobs but whatever. Gainsight needs to realize folks work around this anyways by just over-scheduling individual jobs while getting none of the benefits of rule chain dependencies - all this would do would make our lives massively easier.

cc @pgeorge 

• Advanced Cron Scheduler in Rule Chain New Idea
• 50 Votes

Hey @bradley 

Thanks for looping me in. Let me try and get some PM eyes on this.

Hello, we would also benefit greatly from scheduling a Rule Chain to run more frequently than every day. This is already possible with an individual rule, but utilizing a Chain is much easier to maintain and analyze. 

How are we doing with this? :)