The service offers the possibility to schedule a message that you only need to process after a configured time period. It can be quickly deployed on the chosen infrastructure and then connected to the FLOWX.AI Engine through Kafka events.

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Using the scheduler

After deploying the scheduler service in your infrastructure, you can start using it to schedule messages that you need to process at a later time. One such example would be to use the scheduler service to expire processes that were started but haven’t been finished.
First you need to check the configured kafka topics match the ones configured in the engine deployment.
For example the engine topics KAFKA_TOPIC_PROCESS_SCHEDULE_OUT_SET and KAFKA_TOPIC_PROCESS_SCHEDULE_OUT_STOP must be the same with the ones configured in the scheduler at KAFKA_TOPIC_SCHEDULE_IN_SET and KAFKA_TOPIC_SCHEDULE_IN_STOP environment variables.
When a process is scheduled to expire, the engine sends the following message to the scheduler service (on the topic KAFKA_TOPIC_SCHEDULE_IN_SET): 
{
  "applicationName": "onboarding",
  "applicationId": "04f82408-ee66-4c68-8162-b693b06bba00",
  "payload": {
    "scheduledEventType": "EXPIRE_PROCESS",
    "processInstanceUuid": "04f82408-ee66-4c68-8162-b693b06bba00"
  },
  "scheduledTime": 1621412209.353327,
  "responseTopicName": "ai.flowx.process.expire.staging"
}
The scheduled time should be defined as java.time.Instant. At the scheduled time, the payload will be sent back to the response topic defined in the message, like so: 
{
  "scheduledEventType": "EXPIRE_PROCESS",
  "processInstanceUuid": "04f82408-ee66-4c68-8162-b693b06bba00"
}
If you don’t need the scheduled message anymore, you can discard it by sending the following message (on the topic KAFKA_TOPIC_SCHEDULE_IN_STOP) 
{
  "applicationName": "onboarding",
  "applicationId": "04f82408-ee66-4c68-8162-b693b06bba00"
}
These fields, applicationName and applicationId are used to uniquely identify a scheduled message.

Scheduler setup

Steps needed in order to deploy and set up the service