The date time chooser is used to schedule execution of a question group, a service or an individual question within a customized scan. The date time chooser is opened automatically when a task is chosen to run at a later stage instead of now.
The date time chooser form has a drop down list to allow selection of the month and year, and a calendar-like overview to select the day.
Hours, minutes and seconds are also chosen by means of dropdown lists.
Depending on the task, the choice between "Absolute" and "Relative" must be made (this option is missing when defining a service configuration for Baan/Database Client/Server). The difference between the two options is explained next.
When specifying a date/time, time differences between the client and the server must be taken into consideration. If the server is located within the same time zone, time differences will normally be limited to a number of seconds or minutes maximum. But if the server is located within a different time zone, deviations are bound to be in the order of hours.
For better control in the case of time differences, a choice can be made between absolute and relative times:
When to choose which of the two options is a matter of taste.
The absolute option may be convenient if you want to start a task in off-peak hours, e.g. at 10:00 pm. The choice garantees that the process is started on the server exactly at the specified server time. The condition is naturally that the entered time is ahead of the current server time. Otherwise your task occurs in the past and will not execute. Therefore the choice for absolute time requires you to know the server time.
The relative time is interesting if you want to start a task after a specific period has expired, rather than at a particular server time. The important thing to remember for this option (as mentioned above) is that the time difference is calculated not at the point you leave the date time chooser, but at the time you click the "Finish" button in the wizard that allows you to start the task.