Schedule Tasks in Spring 3 : @Scheduled

Spring provides excellent support for scheduling jobs based on different implementations. (eg: cron). This scheduling is possible with use of @Scheduled annotation. According to spring documentation:

Spring 3.0 also adds annotation support for both task scheduling and asynchronous method execution. The @Scheduled annotation can be added to a method along with trigger metadata.

In this post, I will show the means to use this feature in 4 different ways.

@Scheduled annotation

This annotation is used for task scheduling. The trigger information needs to be provided along with this annotation. You can use the properties fixedDelay/fixedRate/cron to provide the triggering information.

1. fixedRate makes Spring run the task on periodic intervals even if the last invocation may be still running.
2. fixedDelay specifically controls the next execution time when the last execution finishes.
3. cron is a feature originating from Unix cron utility and has various options based on your requirements.

Example usage can be as below:

@Scheduled(fixedDelay =30000)
public void demoServiceMethod () {... }

@Scheduled(fixedRate=30000)
public void demoServiceMethod () {... }

@Scheduled(cron="0 0 * * * *")
public void demoServiceMethod () {... }

To use @Scheduled in your spring application, you must first define below xml namespace and schema location definition in your application-config.xml file.

xmlns:task="http://www.springframework.org/schema/task"

 

http://www.springframework.org/schema/task

http://www.springframework.org/schema/task/spring-task-3.0.xsd

Above additions are necessary because we will be using annotation based configurations. Now add below definition to enable annotations.

1	<task:annotation-driven>

Task scheduling using cron expression from properties file 

In this method, cron attribute is used with @Scheduled annotation. Value of this attribute must be a cron expression as in previous method, BUT, this cron expression will be defined in a properties file and key of related property will be used in @Scheduled annotation.

This will decouple the cron expression from source code, thus making changes easy.

A sample class will look like this:

 @Scheduled(cron = "${cron.expression}")

    public void demoServiceMethod()

    {

        System.out.println("Current time is :: "+ new Date());

    }

application configuration will look like this:

?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

<?xml  version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"  xmlns:task="http://www.springframework.org/schema/task"  xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"  xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd         http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd         http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util.xsd         http://www.springframework.org/schema/task http://www.springframework.org/schema/task/spring-task-3.0.xsd">       <task:annotation-driven />     <util:properties id="applicationProps" location="application.properties" />     <context:property-placeholder properties-ref="applicationProps" />     <bean id="demoServicePropertiesExample" class="com.howtodoinjava.service.DemoServicePropertiesExample"></bean> </beans>

Task scheduling using cron expression configured in context configuration

In this method, cron expression is configured in properties file, and job scheduling is configured in configuration file using property key for cron expression. Major change is that you do not need to use @Scheduled annotation on any method. Method configuration is also done in application configuration file.

application configuration will look like this:

?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

<?xml  version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"  xmlns:task="http://www.springframework.org/schema/task"  xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"  xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd         http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd         http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util.xsd         http://www.springframework.org/schema/task http://www.springframework.org/schema/task/spring-task-3.0.xsd">       <task:annotation-driven />     <util:properties id="applicationProps" location="application.properties" />     <context:property-placeholder properties-ref="applicationProps" />     <bean id="demoServiceXmlConfig" class="com.howtodoinjava.service.DemoServiceXmlConfig" />       <task:scheduled-tasks>         <task:scheduled ref="demoServiceXmlConfig" method="demoServiceMethod" cron="#{applicationProps['cron.expression']}"></task:scheduled>     </task:scheduled-tasks> </beans>

Sourcecode : Download

Reference:

• http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?83053-Feature-Scheduled-with-Value-cron-expression
• http://howtodoinjava.com/2013/04/23/4-ways-to-schedule-tasks-in-spring-3-scheduled-example/