Concatenate Cron Expressions in a Trigger

[Joe_Matuch (Joseph Matuch)]

Hey, friends!

We have 20 Triggers set up with this Cron expression: 0 0,15,30,45 1-22 ? * 2-6
So, the Bots all kick off jobs every 15 minutes from 1AM to 10:45PM every Monday-Friday.

We need to add weekend times to the Cron expression that are different from the weekday times, if possible:
0 0,15,30,45 1-15 ? * 1,7

Is there a way to concatenate these 2 Cron expressions within a single Trigger?
Or, do we need to create 20 new Triggers?

We were hoping to be able to do something like:
0 0,15,30,45 1-22 ? * 2-6 & 0 0,15,30,45 1-15 ? * 1,7

Thanks.

[TimK (Tim Kok)]

Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible to combine 2 cron expressions into 1.

[Nitya1 (Nitya Tomar)]

Hi @Joe_Matuch

Unfortunately, there is no way to concatenate two Cron expressions within a single Trigger in UiPath Orchestrator. Each Trigger can only have a single Cron expression.

To achieve the desired functionality, you will need to create new Triggers for the weekend times. You can create 20 new Triggers with the following Cron expression:

0 0,15,30,45 1-15 ? * 1,7

This Cron expression will trigger the bots every 15 minutes from 1AM to 3:45PM every Saturday and Sunday.

I hope it helps.

[Joe_Matuch (Joseph Matuch)]

Thanks, @TimK and @Nitya1 . That’s what I suspected. There are advantages to keeping the weekday and weekend triggers separate, anyway, in case we need to turn one set off for an extended time.

In the meantime, we discovered that we could combine the weekday triggers for all 20 Bots by pairing up the Bots and VDIs in the section where you allocate hostnames. Again, there are pros and cons to having them all on a single trigger. On the one hand, a single trigger is less work to configure; on the other hand, you have to edit the trigger and remove a Bot from it — instead of simply disabling it — if you want to turn it off for a single Bot.

Thanks again.

[chad_boss1 (Chad Boss)]

Is this true even when using the semi-colon as a separator? That seems to be a valid way of combining two cron schedules into a single expression in most cron expression editors. My use case is this expression: 0 0 16 ? * 3 * ; 0 0 9 ? * 6 * which should run the job on Tuesday afternoon and again on Friday morning. Is this a limitation of the Quartz version of cron which UiPath uses?

[Joe_Matuch (Joseph Matuch)]

@chad_boss1

0 0 16 ? * 3 * ; 0 0 9 ? * 6 *

[chad_boss1 (Chad Boss)]

Yes, the error you posted is exactly what i’m trying to understand. My impression is that it is possible to combine cron expressions if they are separated by a semicolon.