Notification of time to do something

Doug · 02-19-2020 02:33 PM

Hi, in my app, users will schedule events in the future. I’d like to be able to ping them somehow, whether by the phone itself, SMS, etc… something to say “it’s time”. Is this possible?
Since this may already exist, I haven’t marked it as a feature request (yet).

Thanks

Marc_Dillon

You can do this with the Reports section.

Doug

Thanks for getting back to me, Marc. That’s a helpful page, but it seems to indicate that reports are run on a predetermined schedule (like every day at 2 pm), which is what I also see when I’m creating one. If there is information in that page about how to run a report at a time that a user selects in my app, my apologies but I missed it. Please let me know. Thanks!

Phil

Hi Doug,

You would create a table that contains the Scheduled Events.
Each unique event would have its own row in that table.
One of the fields in the table would be a DateTime field specifying when the event should occur.
Another fields in the table would be the user email or phone number of the user.

You would create a Report (Schedule Rule) that fires on a regular schedule.
It might fire once each day at an hour you specify.
It would scan the table and look for events that are due soon.
It would generate an email, SMS, or Notification reminding the user of the upcoming event.

If you need to run the Report more frequently than once a day, then you need to create multiple instances of the Report. For example, it might run every two hours during normal working hours, so you would create four instances of the Report. All instances are identical except they are spaced at 2 hour intervals.

Doug

Thanks for the details, Phil. I think if I wanted to offer unlimited flexibility I’d need a report for each minute of the day, but at least I now understand what’s possible.
I’ll add a feature request to allow report timing to be scheduled within the apps.

Thanks!