Scheduler

Learn how to automatically trigger Web Scraper API tasks and the basics of Cron expressions.

You can set up and manage your schedules through the Thordata dashboard, specifying that the Web Scraper API runs automatically at specific times or according to specific rules. With Cron expressions, you can flexibly arrange the running frequency of tasks.

Note: In most cases, the scheduled tasks will be triggered within one second of the scheduled time. However, due to system or server reasons, there may be a slight delay in task execution.

Setting Up a New Scheduled Task

Access the Timer Page: First, you need to navigate to the "Timer" page. Then, click on the [Create Scheduled Task] button in the top-left corner of the page to enter the scheduled task setup page.

Configure the Scheduled Task:

• Scheduled Task Name: You can customize the name of the scheduled task for easier management.

• Scheduled Settings:The timing plan setup tool uses Cron expressions to specify the running time. If you are familiar with how to use Cron expressions, you can start using it directly. If you are not familiar with them, don’t worry— the setup tool provides a visual custom configuration page, including tools for setting by minute, hour, day, week, or month. It offers similar scheduling functions to Cron expressions, and although its functionality is not as powerful as that of Cron expressions, you can still directly customize and set the timing plan.

• Choose Scraping API: Choose the target scraping API and configure the content to be scraped.

• Finally, click on [Confirm] to complete the setup.

Cron: The standard Cron expression (5 fields) is used to specify the execution time of a task. The expression format is: minute hour day month week, consisting of a total of five fields.

Parameters:

Field	Name	Value Range	Definition
1	Minute	0-59	The minute of the hour
2	Hour	0-23	The hour of the day
3	Day	1-31 or ?	The day of the month
4	Month	1-12	The month of the year
5	Weekday	0-7 (0 and 7 represent Sunday) or ?	The day of the week

Example: 0 8 * * 1-5 This means the scraping task will run every weekday (Monday to Friday) at exactly 8:00 AM.