# Siren Platform User Guide

#### Scheduler Cron Syntax

##### Introduction

Cron-Expressions are used to configure schedules. Cron-Expressions are strings that are actually made up of seven sub-expressions, that describe individual details of the schedule. These sub-expression are separated with white-space, and represent:

Seconds
Minutes
Hours
Day-of-Month
Month
Day-of-Week

Individual sub-expressions can contain ranges and/or lists.

Wild-cards (the ‘‘ character) can be used to say “every” possible value of this field. Therefore the ‘‘ character in the “Month” field of the previous example simply means “every month”. A ‘*’ in the Day-Of-Week field would therefore obviously mean “every day of the week”.

All of the fields have a set of valid values that can be specified. These values should be fairly obvious – such as the numbers 0 to 59 for seconds and minutes, and the values 0 to 23 for hours. Day-of-Month can be any value 1-31, but you need to be careful about how many days are in a given month! Months can be specified as values between 0 and 11. Days-of-Week can be specified as values between 1 and 7 (1 = Sunday).

The ‘/’ character can be used to specify increments to values. For example, if you put ‘0/15’ in the Minutes field, it means ‘every 15th minute of the hour, starting at minute zero’. If you used ‘3/20’ in the Minutes field, it would mean ‘every 20th minute of the hour, starting at minute three’ – or in other words it is the same as specifying ‘3,23,43’ in the Minutes field. Note the subtlety that “/35″ does *not mean “every 35 minutes” – it mean “every 35th minute of the hour, starting at minute zero” – or in other words the same as specifying ‘0,35’.

The ‘?’ character is allowed for the day-of-month and day-of-week fields. It is used to specify “no specific value”. This is useful when you need to specify something in one of the two fields, but not the other.

###### Example Cron Expressions

Example 1 – an expression to create a trigger that simply fires every 5 minutes

0 0/5 * * * ?

Example 2 – an expression to create a trigger that fires every 5 minutes, at 10 seconds after the minute (i.e. 10:00:10 am, 10:05:10 am, etc.).

10 0/5 * * * ?

Example 3 – At 10 seconds of every even minute

10 */2 * ? * *

Example 4 – At 10 seconds of every odd minute

10 1-59/2 * ? * *

Example 5 – Every 5 minutes, Weekdays from 8-5.

0 */5 8-16 ? * 2-6

##### Format

Field

Mandatory

Allowed Values

Allowed Special Characters

Seconds

Yes

0-59

, – * /

Minutes

Yes

0-59

, – * /

Hours

Yes

0-23

, – * /

Day of the Month

Yes

1-31

, – * ? / L W

Month

Yes

1-12 or JAN-DEC

, – * /

Day of week

Yes

1-7 or SUN-SAT

, – * ? / L #

Year

No

empty, 1970-2099

, – * /