Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers

Complex Schedules

There are several ways to satisfy the need for a complex schedule. The easiest solution may be to schedule additional tasks. For example, if you need to run a webbot once at 6:20 PM and again at 6:45 PM, the simplest solution is to create another task that runs the same webbot at the later time.

The Task Scheduler is also capable of managing very complex schedules. If you right-click your webbot in the Task Scheduler window, select the Schedule tab, and then click the Advanced button, you can create the schedule shown in Figure 23-7, which runs the webbot every 10 minutes from 6:20 PM to 9:10 PM, every weekday except Wednesdays, starting on January 16, 2008.

Figure 23-7. An advanced weekly schedule

If a monthly period is required, ...