Agents rule form
Completing the Schedule tab

Field

Description

The order in which you specify agents does not create a sequence. Each agent activity runs individually on its own interval schedule, as a separate requestor thread.

Identify the name of the agent. Typically developers use the same name for the agent and the agent activity. Select a name that is unique within the list of agents in this Agents rule. Click the arrow to expand the row and configure the agent activity.

Select one of the following to specify the schedule type for the agent activity:

• Periodic — The agent runs the activity and then "sleeps" for the number of seconds entered in the Interval column.
• Recurring — The agent runs the activity based on a specified calendar schedule (for example, every Monday at 5:00 P.M.).

The value you enter in this section can be overridden in the generated agent schedule instances. For information about configuring the interval or schedule for this agents rule, see Pega Developer Network article PRKB-25048 How to set agent schedule intervals.

If the Pattern field is set to Periodic, enter the amount of time in seconds that the agent waits before starting (or restarting) this activity after the queue is empty. By default, this value must be at least five seconds.

If the Pattern field is set to Recurring, click  Advanced   to examine or modify the schedule in the Recurrence dialog box.

Completing the Recurrence dialog box.

1. Enter a time in the Start field.

2. Specify the time zone in the time zone field. Be sure to use the long designation rather than the three-letter acronym; for example, use "America/New_York" rather than EST. Otherwise you will need to edit the schedules twice a year to accommodate the change to and from Daylight Savings Time — for example, change EST to EDT in the spring, and then back to EST again in the fall.

3. Configure one of the options in the Pattern section.

3. Click  OK  to close the dialog box. The values you entered do not appear on the Schedule tab.

The values you enter in the Recurrence dialog box can be overridden in the generated agent schedule instances.

Indicates whether the agent uses the agent queue capability ( introduced in V5.4) to process items from the agent queue. This feature allows the agent to temporarily skip over items that fail — for example, because a needed resource is locked — and try again later to process the item later.

• Legacy — Specifies that this is an agent that was created in a version prior to V5.4 and has not yet been updated. This option is not available for agents created in V5.4 or later.
• Standard — Specifies that this agent processes items from an agent queue and that it relies on the system to provide object locking and other transactional support.
• Advanced — Specifies that this agent uses custom queuing. See Pega Developer Network article PRKB-25045 Understanding agent queues.

As a preferred approach in new development, choose Standard. To take advantage of agent queue capabilities, you can upgrade a Legacy agent activity to Standard. Depending on the complexity of the activity and transaction-related design features, this may be easy to accomplish.

Select to indicate this agent is to run whenever the system is running. In most cases, select the check box. Clear the check box to disable the agent at system startup. Disabling agents at system startup is useful when debugging the agent, or to implement optional features.

This option defines the default behavior of this agent. You can override this check box value in the generated agent schedule instances.

Click the icon at the left of a row to access additional fields for the row.

Specify the Applies To key part of the agent activity. In most cases this is the class of the work objects that the agent is processing.

Specify the name of the activity that provides the processing for this agent (the agent activity).

Click to provide values for input parameters for the activity.

For agents of the Standard queue mode, the maximum number of items from the agent queue that are processed at one time by the agent before it goes back to sleep for its interval. If this field is blank, the default value is 50. To specify that the agent is to process all entries in its queue before sleeping, enter 0.

This value is the maximum number of items to process. If Max Records is 30 and there are only 20 entries in the agent queue when the agent wakes, the agent processes the 20 entries and sleeps; it does not wait for an additional 10 entries.

For agents of the Standard queue mode, indicates whether the agent uses the agent queue functionality. When this option is selected, the system locks items that are retrieved from the queue by the agent until the agent is finished with the item (commit or rollback). If a transient condition means the item can't be processed (perhaps the work object is locked), the system requeues the item and the agent can try again the next time it wakes up.

When this option cleared, the queue items for this agent do not persist. That is, when an agent attempts to process an item, that item is removed from the queue and the agent gets one chance to process it. If it fails, the item is not put back in the queue for another attempt.

Field

Description

Specifies whether the Agent Manager master agent is to generate agent schedule data instances (Data-Agent-Schedule class) for this rule when it checks for new agents rules. Agent schedules are not generated unless this option is selected.

You can override this value in the generated agent schedule instances.

Provides a default value for all agents listed in the rule that are set to have a Pattern of Periodic but do not have a value specified in their Interval field. Enter the amount of time, in seconds, that an agent waits between running its activity. This value must be at least five seconds.