Hi Tom,
Thank you very much for your paper on the Cron package. I was not familiar with it. One question, can you use the Notification package rather then creating cron_notifications.
Here is how I would see it working. Each cron job is an object that a user can request notification on. For example there is a daily status report run at 2am each day. The user could request an instant notification on this and get his report at 2am. Or he could choose a weekly notification and get one email each week with all the daily reports aggregated. One would have to be careful on the UI because if you choose a daily notification on a daily report you might end up with your report being sent a long time after it was generated.
We have a feature we need to add in the next week that might use the Cron Package, probably in its current form since we need it now.
On our Project Portfolio Management Site, the user can currently generate a report on all closed tasks for a project within a date range. The report is about a screen full per task and includes pictures, a survey response and some other task specific data. There is an option that lets the user "email this page" to any address.
The next step is to nightly send one email with this same report for each task marked complete in the last 24 hours. We can't insert a notification at the time of status change because the report must include the most up to date photos and survey response and potentially someone could make a typo and find it later, add more information later in the day, etc.
Does this sound like a good application for the current Cron Package?
