VisualCron API & GUI

Introduction

VisualCron is a powerful GUI tool that allows users to schedule jobs similar to Windows Tasks Scheduler, except it provides additional powerful features to easily perform complex processing using numerous cutting edge technologies ranging from as simple as running Cmd/PowerShell commands, JSON, Excel, PDF processing, data flow control, calls to SSIS packages, and for anything that is not built-in you can run your code code using almost any programming language of your choice.

VisualCron also comes a comprehensive API that allows you to interact/control your jobs via .NET code (using one of the language that can handle .NET such as C#, VB.Net, PowerShell etc.)

Following tutorial includes some useful tip, tricks and guidelines on various topic on VisualCron that I wrote over the years during developing process automation and problem solving using VisualCron.

Full documentation can be seen at https://www.visualcron.com/documentation.aspx.

TODO.

Why use API?

Recently we needed to decommission a server which was being used by few (unknown) VisualCron jobs. All we knew was that some jobs were exporting / copying output files into this server (that was being decommissioned).

A task was created for one of the teams to go through all the (hundreds of) jobs in the VisualCron UI to identify which jobs was copying files to this server. Considering the sheer number of jobs that contain tens of tasks / steps, it would have been an extremely time/resource consuming task.

I discovered that VisualCron comes with an API allowing us to programmatically query/interact with the VisualCron instance, which I ended up using to resolve our problem. The outcome was incredibly productive.

Here is the code that I wrote in PowerShell (which can be easily be translated in C# if needed).

Following code lists the specific jobs and tasks that copy files to specified server (along with the file destinations):

Another useful utilisation of the API was to list the recipient(s) from the Email-Task.

Accessing VisualCron Variables & Values via API

There are 2 types of variables in VisualCron: a) Global User variables, and b) Job variables, following code allows us to query both of these variables (names & values etc.)

TODO...