Question

I want to schedule a method call in Spring MVC to run after every two hours. This I can easily do via Spring 3.0 Time Scheduler. However, I want to kick the execution off only at a specific time of the day. That is, the method should only be invoked every 2 hours starting at a particular time.

For example – I want the method to run every 2 hours starting 6 AM.
The TimeScheduler interface has a scheduleAtFixedRate method which is overloaded to use startTime Date argument. I am not really sure how to use this.

Any idea how this can be achieved ?

Answer 1

You could take a look at the TaskScheduler interface. It provides a method scheduleAtFixedRate(Runnable task, Date startTime, long period) which returns a ScheduledFuture. You can use this with some simple Spring configuration:

<task:scheduler id="scheduler" pool-size="10"/>

This will create an instance of ThreadPoolTaskScheduler which implements TaskScheduler. Wire this bad boy into the class to call your specific method:

public class MyClass {
    @Autowired
    private TaskScheduler scheduler;

    public void init() {
        scheduler.scheduleAtFixedRate(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                myMethod();
            }
        }, new Date(), 1000 * 60 * 60 * 2); //This will start now and run every two hours
    }

    public void myMethod() {
        // the method you want to invoke
    }
}