Hello,
We have a machine for packing sausages with vacuum.
In the machine configuration there are several activity triggers that rules data comes from machine, what happens when machine runs, what happens when machine stops, which data to save and how.
I got a demand to send SMS message to the department manager when machine stops to more than 10 minutes, this SMS must be sent automaticaly.
In other systems I would create a background job that listen to machine data and when the machine stops, calculate time differences, when this value is bigger than 10 minute, send the SMS to the right person and mark somewhere that SMS was sent.
But because in Tulip you don’t have the ability for background jobs, I can’t do it here.
So, how can I implement such process ?
The way I would approach this specific use case is to do this logic in an application, as a customer, I did this in the background on a timer trigger on a dashboard app that just ran on a wall TV.
We are actively working to make this sort of headless logic truly headless. This means that logic needs to run in the cloud on some cadence (or on some triggering activity). The past 6 months have been spent (in part) developing all the architecture to be able to support exactly this. Along with this will be a revamp of Triggers to both increase their functionality, and decrease their complexity to setup. I would expect to see a vast majority of the deliverables for this team by the end of the year, some extending into 2023.
We have also recently released alerting for analytics, this allows you to automate communication like this whenever an analytic goes outside a predefined threshold. Right now those alerts only happen hourly, so it probably isn’t mature enough for your use case, but it is actively being improved, I will pass this feedback to that team.
Hi Pete,
So you say that if I want to activate a “background job” I have to put it on non-stopping station and depend on it so it won’t stop working on any reason (it’s not a server but simple work station) instaed of getting on-line service from a connection to a machine from your server in amazon or where ever the server is, I prefer on waiting to your fixing of this issue instead of realese a version that is not stable for sure telling my customers that Tulip still doesn’t have solution for their demand.
About the analytics alerts, how can I use it ? maybe I can use it until you will supply the original solution.
The solution of a never stopping app is far from ideal, but something many customers do have running in production, so it is something that can be done stably.
Alerting for analytics just went out for beta in the past few versions. I just reached out to the team to see where the documentation stands. We generally release support articles when features get a full release.