I’ve seen this question come up a few times on the
Oracle Community Forums recently, so I thought I’d write a quick blog post about it. The question is along the lines of
“How can I schedule a concurrent program to run every X minutes between Y o’clock and Z o’clock each day?”.
For this example, we’ll assume we have a program “Active Users” that we wish to run every 20 minutes between the hours of 09:00 and 17:30, Monday to Friday.
First we need to define a new work shift to match our timing requirements. This can be accessed from
System Administrator responsibility,
Concurrent > Manager > Workshifts.
Next we define the new manager via
Concurrent > Manager > Define.
We then define the work shift that we just created against this new manager along with the number of concurrent processes limit for that window. Note that you can define combinations of work shifts to achieve more complex scheduling, however we will keep it simple for this example. Define the sleep seconds as you see fit (note a small value will get picked up quicker, but adds additional overhead to the system).
We then need to
include our “Active Users” concurrent program on this manager, and
exclude it from the standard manager using the
Specialization Rules.
| Working Hours Manager |
Standard Manager |
 |
 |
Finally we activate the new manager using
Concurrent > Manager > Administer
… and we also restart the
Standard Manager from the same screen.
When scheduling our request we now simply choose to run periodically on a 20 minute schedule (ignore the warning about no end date).
We see that the program runs as expected during the work hours.
Running the following script we can see that the new manager has picked up the program.
select q.concurrent_queue_name from fnd_concurrent_requests r join fnd_concurrent_processes p on p.concurrent_process_id = r.controlling_manager join fnd_concurrent_queues q on q.concurrent_queue_id = p.concurrent_queue_id where r.request_id = 10619012; CONCURRENT_QUEUE_NAME ------------------------------ WORK_HOURS
When we get outside the work shift that we defined against the manager, the request goes into
“Inactive – No Manager” and will wait in that status until we’re back within the manager work shift window, at which time it will start running automatically again until the end of the window.
Clearly it’s not sensible to create a new manager for every individual program you wish to run in this style, so it’s advisable to create your manager somewhat generically, as we did in the example above. Then any future programs that need to run within
working hours can simple be included on this manager and excluded from the standard manager.
