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Scheduled Exports

A Scheduler instance wraps any exporter and triggers it on a cron schedule.

Creating a scheduler

Schedulers can be created:

  • Via the Django admin
  • Via the UI at outputs:scheduler_create
  • Directly from an existing Export at outputs:scheduler_create_from_export (pre-fills content type, fields, format, context, exporter path, query string, and recipients from the source export)

Routine choices

Routine Cron (UTC) Description
DAILY 0 7 * * * Every day at 08:00 local (07:00 UTC)
WEEKLY 0 7 * * 1 Every Monday at 08:00 local
MONTHLY 0 7 1 * * First day of each month at 08:00 local
CUSTOM user-supplied Arbitrary cron expression validated via croniter

Lifecycle management

The scheduler job is managed automatically via Django signals:

  • Create – post_save registers a new cron job in Redis and stores its ID on the Scheduler record.
  • Update – pre_save detects changes to is_active, routine, or cron_string and re-registers the job after saving.
  • Deactivate (is_active = False) – the cron job is cancelled and job_id is cleared.
  • Delete – pre_delete cancels the cron job before the record is removed, leaving no orphaned Redis jobs.

Execution

Each time the cron fires, schedule_export() in cron.py:

  1. Fetches the Scheduler record by its PK.
  2. Calls execute_export(scheduler.exporter, language=scheduler.language), which saves a new Export record and enqueues the mail job exactly as a manual export would.
  3. Appends the execution timestamp to scheduler.executions.

See Processing for the full async pipeline.