Learning Timers in OutSystems — How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Asynchronous Tasks.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying and learning so much since I’ve been with KinetIT. It has been an amazing journey through these past weeks; I’ve met a lot of interesting and great people, always eager to help, I’ve learned lots of tools to work and learn in a very productive way and, of course, I’ve honed my skills as an OutSystems Developer.
One of the tools that I find very interesting to use in OutSystems, be it in Traditional Development or in Reactive, is the possibility of creating timers.
What can we use this for? As it turns out, many things! Do you want to schedule automatic tasks, as in sending emails at predetermined times, run background tasks during specific times in a day or even combine it with BPTs (Business Process Technology) to automate whole operations? Timers can help you with all that!
As timers can be a very powerful thing, we need to keep in mind that they can also create a lot of problems if not implemented correctly. With that in mind, always keep, in the back of your mind, a few best practices to consider, like Timeout Prevention and garantee that It Does Not Repeat Work.
Making sense? Allow me to show a quick example of these possibilites.
In this example, we will have a Timer that will send emails once per week.
How will we use it? We need to add it to an Action that will “wake it up” when the time comes, so that it can be used.
We will call it ProcessFileUpload, and it’s located in the Processes tab in OutSystems Service Studio.
Notice the “waking” action part of the timer.
In the end of this operation, we could have something like this:
After all the verifications, like checking for the existence of the files to upload, commit the transactions and verifying if the time has expired for the commit, the little WakeProcessFileUpload will launch the timer and send the emails with the files. Neat!
As I learn more and more about OutSystems, I hope to be able to achieve a very good understanding in creating all kinds of apps and grow more as a professional and as a person, always eager to learn more.
Thank you KinetIT and let’s OutSystems foward!
