Wait Queue Item activity needs suspend option

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My automations always send a Job Completion Summary email before the job stops. It shows all items processed during that Job. For lower volume processes, there are a lot of summary emails with only one or two items listed. The Job starts from the queue trigger, processes the one or two items, and stops, repeatedly throughout the day.

This is a time-sensitive automation so we cannot set it to run only after X number of items are in the queue.

Is there any way to suspend the Job (to free up resources ie license/robot) and wait for a new queue item to be added? This way the Job ends up processing more items and could be set to end at a certain time (ie end of business). Then just one summary email for the day.

The Wait Queue Item activity is close, but it doesn’t appear to suspend the Job - so it’ll just sit there sucking up a license. The suspend functionality of the Wait for Queue Item and Resume activity is close, but the way it works is backwards (it creates a queue item and waits for it to be completed).

The only other way I can think of to consolidate the summary emails would be an automation dedicated to sending those emails, and then other automations create queue items for it - or put items into Excel files for it to read, compile the summary email, and send. Workable but seems like a pain and uses up more license/robot resources.

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@postwick

One more way you can try is to save the last report sent time in asset and then send an email today again after a certain time and get all the queue items from the previous sent time in asset to current time and reset the time in asset again for next day…to stop sending multiple if the date in asset is today then do not send email if not check if the time has passed a given time like 5pm or so and send thw email…this control can make sure you send only ine summary email a day

Cheers

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This is an interesting idea. I’m not sure how this would work with queue triggers though, if no items come in after the “send email after this time” then it won’t ever get sent. Maybe we could create an additional time trigger to make sure it runs at least once after that designated time.

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@postwick

Generally what we do is to send the summary email with the first run of the day that is the first trigger so that whenever it runs it would summarize all till that and next day we will get previous days report this way if no items are added that day then no email would be sent but the next day once items are added it would send all pending items …

But yes if we need summary email daily for sure then we can go with a time trigger

Cheers

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