VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

Running Scheduled Tasks and Task Groups

Despite having schedules, task groups don't just go off and run themselves: something needs to trigger them to run. That can be done by:

• Manually executing the task group (right-clicking on it)
• Manually running all scheduled task groups by clicking on Run eligible task groups from within the Scheduled tasks tool
• Running individual tasks or task groups from the command line
• Starting VSys in schedule mode
• Running VSys from the command line with the runschedule command line option.

Running individual tasks or task groups from the command line

In each task group and task you'll see a hyperlink in the upper-right corner. Clicking on that link will copy the task group or task's ID to the Windows clipboard. To run that individual task or task group, run VSys with "task:" plus the ID code on the command line:
VSys.exe task:NNM74JAMCZCW0A0M
VSys will run just this one task group or task and then exit.

You can create a shortcut for running an individual task by right-clicking on that task and selecting Create a desktop shortcut to run this task; for a task group, right-click on that task group and selecting Create a desktop shortcut to run this task group.

When a task group is executed manually, its schedule is ignored. That means that if you manually start a task group which is supposed to run every four hours and do it three times in a row, VSys will happily do as you command. Any tasks within that task group which have frequency restrictions will be respected, however.

Schedule mode

Start VSys in schedule mode one of two ways: click on the Start task scheduler mode link on the Administrator tools panel, or start VSys with the command line option schedulemode:
VSys.exe schedulemode

Both bring up the same tool. This tool will check every five minutes for task groups which are eligible to be run. If it finds any, it runs them, then waits five minutes and checks again. Using the command line mode is usually better than running it from the Administrator tools panel: in that way it can be done with a Windows shortcut, and if you license VSys with concurrent user licenses, schedule mode from the command line does not tie up a license.

Note that when running from the Administrator tools panel that while VSys is running, it's inaccessible. That's important since the task groups that VSys is running would interfere with your normal usage of VSys. Nothing prevents you from launching a second copy of VSys on the same machine that you use for your regular tasks, of course.

One-time schedule running

Starting VSys with the runschedule command line option,
VSys.exe runschedule
Tells VSys to check for eligible task groups, and if there are any, to run them. Once it's done, or if it finds no task groups to execute, VSys will exit.