There are lots of domain-specific languages for schedules. The most prominent might be Cron (for *nix scheduled tasks), but there's also RRULE (for iCalendar events) and many others. Cron isn't exactly what I'd call human-friendly. Can you tell me what 10 8,20 * 8 1-5 means if you don't use Cron often? Some DSL's go in the opposite direction and are wildly verbose, or will sacrifice expressiveness for simplicity.

So... I wrote my own DSL to solve those problems, and it's called Schyntax. Part 1 of this post is about the language itself. In Part 2, we'll look at how to setup Schyntax-based scheduled task runners in both JavaScript and C#.

Schyntax Syntax

In contrast with other scheduling DSL's, Schyntax explicitly tries to be powerful, easy to remember, and terse, but human readable. To a programmer, the syntax should feel immediately familiar and intuitive. For example, hour(5) means to run on the fifth hour of every day. minute(*) means to run every minute. seconds(3,8,52) would run on the third, eighth, and fifty-second seconds of every minute.

Ranges

Want to define a range? Borrowing range operators from modern programming languages, minute(5..7) would run every minute between the fifth and seventh minutes, inclusive (5,6,7). minute(5..<7) is the same range, except it excludes the end value (5,6).

Intervals

What if you want to run every fifth minute? As a programmer, if you wanted to run a command on every fifth iteration of a loop, you might use the modulus operator (typically % ).

for (var i = 0; i < 50000; i++) { if (i % 5 == 0) { // code to run on every fifth iteration } }

Schyntax captures the spirit of that by using minute(* % 5) to indicate "run every five minutes." Or, you could use minute(10..22 % 3) to run every third minute starting at the tenth, and ending at the twenty-second (effectively the same as minute(10,13,16,19,22) ).

Intervals always reset at the beginning of a range. For example, minutes(*) is implicitly the range minutes(0..59) , so the interval is always relative to the 0 minute of each hour. minutes(*%17) does NOT mean "run every 17th minute of the day." It means, "run every 17th minute of every hour starting at the first (0) minute of the hour."

Exclusions

The logical negation operator is ! in many programming languages. So if you want to say, "run every minute except the third," you could write minute(!3) . To run every fourth hour except the fifteenth, use hours(*%4, !15) . You can exclude any value, range, or interval. Exclusions always take precedence, so be careful not to exclude too much.

Expression Names

You might have noticed that both plural and singular expression names work (i.e. hour() vs hours() ). In fact, most expressions have several aliases to make it easier to remember without having to go look at the documentation. For example, for minutes, you could use m , min , minute , minutes , minuteOfHour or minutesOfHour .

Schyntax is whitespace-insensitive and case-insensitive, so hours(*) is the same as HOURS ( * ) is the same as hOuRs( *) .

In addition to the hours , minutes , and seconds expressions we've seen so far, Schyntax also supports daysOfWeek , daysOfMonth , and dates expressions. Complete documentation of the supported expressions can be found on the Schyntax GitHub page.

Examples

Every hour from 0900 UTC until, and including, 1700 UTC ( all dates and times are UTC in Schyntax ): hours(9..17)

Every five minutes from 0900 until, but not including, 1700 (notice the half-open range operator ..< instead of .. ): hours(9 ..< 17) min(*%5)

Same as the previous schedule, except only on Monday through Friday (inclusive): days(mon..fri) hours(9 ..< 17) min(*%5)

Same as previous, except it won't run any time during the noon hour (UTC): days(mon..fri) hours(9..<17, !12) min(*%5)

Noon UTC every Monday through Friday, except on Christmas: days(mon..fri) hour(12) date(!12/25)

Noon UTC on the first and last days of the month: daysofmonth(1, -1) hour(12)

Every minute between 2300 and 0100 UTC (ranges which wrap around are okay): hours(23..<1) min(*)

Here's the Schyntax version of the Cron schedule example I gave earlier ( 10 8,20 * 8 1-5 ). See if this feels more readable to you: minute(10), hours(8,20) days(mon..fri) dates(8/1..8/31)

Groups

What if you want to run every five minutes during the week, and every half hour on weekends? You can do that by grouping expressions inside curly braces:

{ days(mon..fri) min(*%5) } { days(sat..sun) min(*%30) }

You could break the groups up into multiple lines if you wanted. Remember, Schyntax is whitespace-insensitive.

Implementations

Although you'll generally want to use the "Schtick" task runner (described in Part 2), you can actually use the DSL directly to generate schedules. Let's show how to extract the next five event times for a schedule in both JavaScript and C#.

JavaScript

Schyntax is available on npm via npm install schyntax .

var schyntax = require('schyntax'); var sch = schyntax('min(*%2)'); // create Schedule object var events = []; var d = new Date(); // start from right now for (var i = 0; i < 5; i++) { d = sch.next(d); // get next event time after the `d` Date argument events.push(d); }

C# .NET

Schyntax for .NET is available on nuget.org.

using Schyntax; var sch = new Schedule("min(*%2)"); // create Schedule object var events = new List<DateTimeOffset>(); var d = DateTimeOffset.UtcNow; // start from right now for (var i = 0; i < 5; i++) { d = sch.Next(d); // get next event time after the `d` Date argument events.Add(d); }

→ goto: In Part 2, we'll use a scheduled task runner to put schyntax to work.. We'll also look at how my team at Stack Overflow is using it to improve consistency in our scheduled tasks.