When the time for an ‘only once’ Event has passed, and the Event Scheduler for the Playlist is opened to Edit the entry, the past entry is shown with a date one year in advance (see image below).
I thought this ‘reschedule’ was simply ‘what the Event system does when an Event expires’ before I opened the Edit dialog (!).
Either the list entry or the dialog is incorrect, yes?
And now that I notice it… the day names (Monday etc.) should be Capitalised in English. From what I recall of my brief pilgrimage to Germany (to the Neideregger shop and cafe in Lubeck), the names of days of the week need not be capitalised in German. Is that correct, Torben? In English, they are always capitalised.
PS: I assume from the check box layout in the dialog that day 1 in a week is Monday and day 7 is Sunday, is that correct?
Yes, you’ve noticed one of the shortcomings of the event scheduler: The “only once” settings is actually a “once per year” one. This is because the scheduler only remeber the day, weekday and month, but not the year. The reason is that the year cannot be internally handled in the same way as the other fields, which are stored in some sort of “set types”, which only works for values in the range of 0…255. I will either change the label or make the scheduler also account the appear.
In German, the week day names like “Montag” are capitalized, as every noun is. However, there are also adverbs which are not capitalized, like “montags”, which means “each monday” or “on mondays”, often found on shop doors, “montags bis freitags geöffnet”, “open monday through friday”.
Fixed in v.42. If you want annual events then, you have to enter the day and month manually into the “user defined” fields. But who wants annual events?
The reason I noticed this, is not because I want annual events, but because I am testing with a single Playlist of Ads., which I keep rescheduling after each test.
I noticed one time that the Event didn’t fire and only then realised that it had been put into 2007 instead of just being left at its original date; so when I had rescheduled it, it went to 2007 instead of 2006.
Just a thought: if your Scheduler only handles day/month, I don’t think the Event Scheduler should show the Year at all. Showing a Year in the Date implies that the Scheduler will handle Events scheduled for any year. If you still want to show a Year, there is no anomaly in showing Next Execution for a time or date which is already in the past!
(PS: the MS SQL Server Task Scheduler has similar shortcomings!)
How difficult (or ‘annoying’ ) would it be to add a Last Executed Time to the Event Scheduler dialog?
It occurred to me that every event scheduler I’ve worked with (e.g MS SQL Server, Veritas/Symantec Backup Exec, and almost every centralised anti-virus software) has such a column.
Being able to see a Last Executed Time for every item in a Schedule makes it much easier for administrators (for mAirList, this might for example be the station’s programme scheduling manager or the ad. traffic manager) to check whether their scheduling is accurate and working as intended.
I would further suggest that the new value should be saved as part of an MLE file when a Schedule is saved. This would allow (for example) one MLE per Playlist per 24h period, at the end of which the station staff on duty (or a script, for us adventurous types ) would Save the current Schedule(s) and could use these Saved MLEs as a sort of automated ‘sign off sheet’ at a later time, to prove whether or not an Event actually fired; or at least, the last time it fired, if any individual Event is scheduled to happen more than once during that period.
I say all this just in case it would be a PITA to implement, because I can see it being of major benefit to 24/7/365 stations (like Leith FM will be in 2007!).
I suppose this should be a Feature Request really, but since we’re already discussing the Event Scheduler here…
That all sounds wonderful, Torben! Good idea about tidying up those columns.
I was meeting with my fellow station Techie Person today and he very much liked my idea of Saving a completed Event List as an MLE at the end of a shift (or day) as an ‘automated log’ of whether an Event was actually executed.
So thank you very much for looking into this and ‘making it so’ in such short order!
mAirList is getting more powerful, more flexible, and more cunning and ‘smart’ (as in: ‘that’s a clever way to do !’) with every beta version, isn’t it? If I were writing a competing playout program, I would be seriously worried.
) would it be to add a