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Appointment Reminder Sender

Submitted by Guest on Wed, 22/12/2021 - 09:43

The Appointment Reminder Sender is a scheduled job that periodically sends SMS appointment reminders.

The fields are as follows:

  • Name
 The job name
  • Description
 The job description
  • Active
 This schedules the job to run if checked, or prevents it from being run if unchecked
  • SMS Before

This determines how long prior to an appointment that the reminder will be sent.  It will never be sent before this, but may be sent after, if the Reminder Sender did not run when the reminder first became due.
  • No SMS Before

This prevents the Reminder Sender sending reminders for appointments that are in the near future, i.e. appointments which start less than the specified interval ahead in time. It must be less than the SMS Before interval.
For both the above, an interval of N days means Nx24 hours and similarly a week means 7x24 hours.  Thus if the job runs at 13:00, an interval of 1 day covers the period up to 13:00 the next day, not 23:59 the next day.
  • No Reminder
 This interval is checked when the appointment is created. If the appointment is less than this interval in the future, then the Send Reminder flag will not be set for the appointment.
  • Process Replies
  • Confirm Appointment
  • Cancel Appointment
See Reply Processing
  • Minutes
  • Hours
  • Day Of Month
  • Month
  • Day Of Week
 See Cron Expression
  • Run As

Specifies the user to run the job as. This user is required to have permissions to:

  • save appointments
  • send notification messages
  • Notify
 Specifies the user or user group to notify when sending has completed. Notification only occurs when SMS message are sent, or errors are encountered. You may want to use a 'real' user or group of real users, or you may want to create a user such as 'Reminder Jobs Message Receiver' used only for these notifications.

Reply Processing

When Process Reply is selected, any reply to the appointment SMS will be examined to see if they match the Confirm Appointment or Cancel Appointment text, ignoring case. If the appointment is:

  • Pending, and the reply matches the Confirm Appointment text, the appointment status is changed to Confirmed
  • Pending or Confirmed, and the reply matches the Cancel Appointment text, the appointment status is changed to Cancelled

Leave the Cancel Appointment field blank to prevent appointments being cancelled by SMS.

Cron Expression

The Minutes, Hours, Day Of Month, Month, and Day Of Week fields determine when the job is run, using a simplified version of a Cron expression:

Field Allowed Values Allowed Special Characters
Minutes 0-59 , - * /
Hours 0-23 , - * /
Day Of Month 1-31 , - * ? /
Month 1-12 or JAN-DEC , - * /
Day Of Week 1-7 or SUN-SAT , - * ? /

Note that only one of Day Of Month and Day Of Week may be specified. If one is specified, the other must be set to ?.

If you change the schedule, the new schedule will take effect immediately.

Examples

Description Minutes Hours Day Of Month Month Day Of Week
Run at 8am every weekday 0 8 ? * mon-fri
Run every 30 minutes */30 * * * ?
Run every 2 hours 0 */2 * * ?
Run every 15 mins between 8am and 6pm on weekdays */15 8-18 ? * mon-fri
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