Timer Service

In most of your projects, you need to schedule things at regular intervals or at a given date in future. As PHP itself is a scripting language, it lacks this functionality. Thus, developers use utilities like CRON when working on Mac OS X or a Linux distribution. If you are working on Windows, it is a bit more challenging. There is a tool called Scheduler, which is not as simple to use as CRON. At this point Timer Service, a good and simple option, comes into play.

As CRON, the Timer Service allows you to schedule processing your functionality at a given date or regular intervals. In contrast to CRON, it allows you to schedule processing the methods of your Beans in such a way. This is done by simply adding an annotation to your method.

<?php

namespace Namespace\Modulename;

/**
 * @Singleton(name="ASingletonProcessor")
 */
class ASingletonProcessor extends \Stackable
{

  /**
   * A dummy method invoked by the container upon timer schedule.
   *
   * @param TimerInterface $timer The timer instance
   *
   * @return void
   * @Schedule(dayOfMonth=EVERY, month=EVERY, year=EVERY, minute=EVERY, hour=EVERY)
   */
  public function invokedByTimer(TimerInterface $timer)
  {
    // do something here every minute
  }
}

The @Schedule annotation on the invokedByTimer() method schedules the invocation of this method every minute without a CRON configured or running. Such Timers can also be created programmatically. If you want to know more about it, have a look at our example.

Another option to create a schedule that invokes a Beans method in intervals, will be the manual implementation of a schedule.

The following example creates a schedule on the Message Bean's timeout() method that'll be invokde every ten seconds, whereas the timer instance, passed to the timeout() method contains the message originall passed to the onMessage() method. This can be a directory that should be parsed every then seconds for new upload files, for example.

<?php

namespace Namespace\Modulename;

/**
 * @MessageDriven
 */
class CreateAIntervalTimer extends AbstractMessageListener
  /**
   * Will be invoked when a new message for this message bean will be available.
   *
   * @param \AppserverIo\Psr\Pms\MessageInterface $message   A message this message bean is listen for
   * @param string                                $sessionId The session ID
   *
   * @return void
   * @see \AppserverIo\Psr\Pms\MessageListenerInterface::onMessage()
   */
  public function onMessage(MessageInterface $message, $sessionId)
  {

    // load the timer service registry
    $timerServiceRegistry = $this->getApplication()->search('TimerServiceContextInterface');

    // load the timer service for this class -> that allows us to invoke the
    // CreateAIntervalTimer::timeout() every 10 secondes
    $timerService = $timerServiceRegistry->lookup('CreateAIntervalTimer');

    // our single action timer should be invoked 10 seconds from now, every 10 seconds
    $initialExpiration = 10000000;
    $intervalDuration = 10000000;

    // we create the interval timer
    $timerService->createIntervalTimer($initialExpiration, $intervalDuration, new String($message->getMessage()));

    // update the message monitor for this message
    $this->updateMonitor($message);
  }

  /**
   * Invoked by the container upon timer expiration.
   *
   * @param \AppserverIo\Psr\EnterpriseBeans\TimerInterface $timer Timer whose expiration caused this notification
   *
   * @return void
   * @Timeout
  **/
  public function timeout(TimerInterface $timer)
  {
    // do something every ten seconds here
  }
}

The Timer Service is available for Singleton and Stateless Session Beans as well as for Message Driven Beans!

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