Campaign Classic - Recurring campaign - Start hour

Description

The customer uses the Recurring campaign (opRecurrent) template for automatic campaigns. Most of the campaigns are planned daily, with an automatic start. When the scheduling is configured, the start time is always set to 00:00:00. The problem they encounter is that each day, the workflows are launched at different hours.
For example, on one specific campaign, we have:

• 06/09/2019: workflow starts at 03:46am
• 05/09/2019: workflow starts at 03:25am
• 04/09/2019: workflow starts at 02:42am
• 03/09/2019: workflow starts at 02:57am
• 02/09/2019: workflow starts at 02:31am
• 01/09/2019: workflow starts at 02:31am

For information, the technical workflow Campaign jobs (operationMgt) runs properly.

Resolution

The cause of this issue is that the workflows that are created in Recurring campaign as per schedule, do not store the time of execution, they only retain the date when they are scheduled to run.

For example:

operationPlanning start="2019-12-21" toStart="1" toValidate="0" uuid="xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx" operation _operation="none" internalName="OP14"/ workflowInstance _operation="none" internalName="WKF37"/ /operationPlanning

In common workflows (not created through the Recurring campaign) that have a Scheduler added as a starting point there is an element schedule that looks something like this and has information on when a workflow will be triggered:

schedule label="Scheduler" name="schedule" x="168" y="320" transitions transition name="transition" target="query"/ /transitions periodm_abDay='7' m_abDay0='0' m_abDay1='0' m_abDay2='0' m_abDay3='0' m_abDay4='0' m_abDay5='0' m_abDay6='0' m_abMonth='12' m_abMonth0='0' m_abMonth10='0' m_abMonth11='0' m_abMonth1='0' m_abMonth2='0' m_abMonth3='0' m_abMonth4='0' m_abMonth5='0' m_abMonth6='0' m_abMonth7='0' m_abMonth8='0' m_abMonth9='0' m_iDayMode='1' m_iMaxIter='0' m_iMonthDay='0' m_iMonthMode='0' m_iPosDay='0' m_iSpanDay='0' m_iSpanWeek='0' m_iTimeMode='1' m_iValidMode='1' m_iWeekDay='0' m_iWeekMode='0' m_tmFixedDay='' m_tmFixedTime='12:40:00.000' m_tmIterDate='' m_tmIterTime='00:00:00.000' m_tmOrgDate='' m_tmSpanTime='0s' m_tmStartDate='' m_tmStartTime='00:00:00.000' m_tmStopDate='' m_tmStopTime='00:00:00.000' m_vtmTime='0'/period /schedule

So in our case, the time of the workflow execution is not considered by the product.

For avoiding this confusion, the scheduling wizard in recurring campaigns was removed in the Campaign Classic release 20.2.1 (build 9178) and onwards.