Wednesday, September 17, 2025, 12:00 noon, CDT (UTC−5:00) Download .ics

Special Topic:
Cron – It’s about time! – Koichi Harada

4D apps are running 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week all over the world, and often they need to execute tasks on a regular basis in the background without user or administrative action. These tasks could be related to maintenance, reporting, importing, exporting, notifications, data checks and fixes, date related events, and so on. The tasks are as varied as the applications themselves.

I, for one, cannot operate without a schedule, and neither can my applications. Many of us have written our own variety of scheduler modules, which normally have a control process running around the clock that checks a list of jobs and fires them off when necessary. This is a very common need, which deserves a very common solution.

Release the daemons! Koichi Harada’s open source Cron component provides a modern, class based, simple yet powerful solution for all of your scheduling needs!

Cron can be used to periodically execute specific Methods or basic Formulas. It is written in pure 4D code, and its source is publicly available on GitHub.

In this user group meeting, Koichi Harada joins us from Japan to demo several options available with the component and explain recent coding improvements, which adopt the shared singleton feature available since 4D 20 R5. Additionally to illustrate the motivation behind starting component development, Koichi will introduce several other components you may find useful.

This meeting is being hosted live with real-time discussion on Zoom.  Click here to join…

To follow along with the meeting slideshow, access it here when it is available…
Meeting slides
Demo slides

Have comments or questions after the meeting?  Either post them here or to discuss.4d.com.

If you cannot attend the live Zoom meeting, no worries!  A recording will be posted to the 4DMethod Youtube channel after the meeting ends.