Scheduled Workflows are time-based, not event-based, so they are triggered on a certain date/time. That totally defines and limits the way they work and the way they must be constructed, which is slightly different than the save event-based workflows.

Scheduled Workflows enable you to run periodic tasks to automate your business. You can program the tasks to be executed when a certain time arrives so you can dedicate your attention to other business operations.

Scheduled Workflow Launch Times

The Scheduled Workflow feature offers you a wide variety of launch times to run your workflow. These options are:

• Hourly: Workflow is executed every hour

• Daily: Workflow is executed every day at the specified time

• Weekly: Workflow is executed on the selected days of every week

• On Specific Date: Workflow is executed on the selected date

• Monthly by Date: Workflow is executed on the selected days of every month

• Yearly: Workflow is executed on the selected day of every year

Scheduled Workflow Conditions Restrictions

Scheduled Workflows are different than event-based workflows and their conditions also have a set of restrictions that the other workflows do not have. Most restrictions stem from the fact that we do not have a unique record to execute expressions against. So we cannot use formulas like

concat(field1,field2)

because there are no field values to concatenate.

To be honest, this type of expression could be supported, but it would need a big rewrite of the query engine so that the application could convert that into a valid SQL statement and do the concatenation in the database. Currently, the application's expression engine expects to have a valid active record that is being saved, so it can concatenate or, in general, operate with the field values of that record. Since Scheduled Workflows do not have one record to send into the formulas, these cannot be used.

Scheduled Workflows work by constructing an SQL statement that asks the database for records that fulfill the conditions. It gets back a whole set of records, not just one.

"So, in short: only a very limited set of formula expressions are supported, basically only those that do not use fields."

Another restriction that stems from this is the use of related entity fields. It is difficult to access fields on related entities in the SQL command that is being constructed, so accessing the fields of an Account from a contact requires some coding that we currently do not have in place.

In general:

• stick with conditions on fields that belong to the entity you are creating the workflow for

• avoid fields and expressions/formulas in the conditions, use the given operators with static rawtext values

Finally, some operators have no meaning in scheduled workflows, mostly the “has changed” type operators which require a specific action of saving to detect the change between the “before” and “after” values. With scheduled workflows there is no “before” value, we are directly selecting records from the database and they have had no change whatsoever.

Scheduled Workflow Conditions

As with all other workflow types, you can set conditions on any field type as long as:

• the field belongs to the entity the workflow is related with

• you use static/rawtext values

You cannot currently use fields from other modules nor use formulas of any type.

To overcome the above restrictions, date fields have some special operators and some special functionality that will permit us to select records based on time which is what this type of workflow is all about.

For date fields we can choose from the next set of operators:

• Is/Is not

• Between

• Before/After

For these operators we can:

• set a fixed value

• use one of the functions:

  • add_days(x): adds x days to today, where today is the day of execution

  • sub_days(x): subtracts x days from today, where today is the day of execution

  • Days ago: accepts a number and will subtract that number of days from today

  • Days later: accepts a number and will add that number of days to today

  • today

  • tomorrow

  • yesterday

Then we have a set of special operators that will take a number of hours or days and calculate a range of dates for the record selection. These are:

• Less than hours before

• Less than hours later

• More than hours before

• More than hours later

• Less than days ago

• Less than days later

• More than days ago

• More than days later

These divide time into four ranges and permits us to set our target date/time in any one of them. The next image depicts the four ranges and you can get a better understanding of looking at the examples below.