In SAS^® Customer Intelligence Studio, when you schedule campaigns to recur more than once a day, the first occurrence might execute earlier than expected. This early execution occurs because of how the scheduling software triggers events.

For example, if you schedule a campaign to run every hour starting on August 12 at 11:00 p.m., the trigger that is sent to the Schedule Manager and the scheduling software is similar to the following:

As you can see, there is a trigger for every hour starting on August 12. However, when August 12 arrives, the first time event that is encountered is 0:00 (midnight) rather than 23:00 (11:00pm). Because there is a trigger for 0, the campaign executes at midnight. Then it executes hourly from then on.

As another example, suppose that at 8:00 a.m. on August 12, you schedule a campaign to run every hour starting at 12 p.m. The first hourly time event that is encountered is 9:00 a.m., for which there is a trigger. Therefore, the campaign executes at 9:00 and then hourly after that.

There is no workaround for this problem.

However, scheduling a campaign to run just once a day behaves as expected, regardless of the recurrence pattern or start time, because only one trigger is assigned, as shown in the example below:

Click the Hot Fix tab in this note to access the hot fix for this issue.

After you apply the hot fix, the following new server option is available:

When this option is set, it prevents hourly scheduled executions that are outside of the schedule window.

Once the option is present, SAS Customer Intelligence blocks the execution of campaigns (individual or members of a group) and/or communications if the scheduler requests an execution before or after the start or end date and time. In addition, a warning similar to the following is generated in the SAS Customer Intelligence core log:

An exit status code of 1 is returned to the flow manager.

In anticipation of potential delays or time differences between the scheduler and SAS Customer Intelligence core, you can configure additional time outside of the schedule time before blocking the execution. The default grace period (deferment) is 30 minutes. As a result, any execute requests that are more than 30 minutes before or after the schedule start and end time are blocked when the -Dsas.ci.blockLauncherExecutionOutsideHourlyScheduleWindow option is set.

You can configure the grace period by adding an operator to the option. For example, to set a grace period of 15 minutes, you set the option as follows:

Operating System and Release Information

A fix for this issue for SAS Marketing Automation 6.4 is available at:

A fix for this issue for SAS Marketing Automation 6.3 is available at: