About Scheduling ColdFusion Pages

The ColdFusion Administrator includes a scheduling facility that allows you to schedule the execution of ColdFusion pages and to generate static HTML pages. The scheduling facility can be very useful for applications that do not require user interactions or customized output. Often, ColdFusion developers use this facility to schedule daily sales reports, corporate directories, statistical reports, and so on: Information that is more often read than written.

Here's how it works. Instead of executing a query every time the page is requested, the static page is served up to users containing information generated by the scheduled event. Response time is faster since there is no database transaction, just an HTML page.

ColdFusion allows you to schedule pages to execute on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can specify a time of day for execution, and you can schedule a page to be run only once on a specified date.

When a scheduled page executes, a message is written to a log file, schedule.log, which specifies the name of the scheduled action, the page that was executed, and whether the page executed successfully or not. For more information about log files, see Chapter 3, "Configuring ColdFusion Server".