Brief Note: I'll be adding some hand-wavy comments to remove parts of the code that aren't related to scheduled jobs. The code is important, but its project specific. Feedback is welcome.

What are Scheduled Jobs?

A scheduled job is a handy tool accessible from the admin panel to run a task doing predefined actions. Normally you'll use these to maintain some part of your project without needing to be involved. This could simply be cleaning out the recycling bin on a scheduled interval, or emailing your admins a list of recent changes once a month.

Scheduled jobs do not need to be scheduled, and can be run on demand, for example indexing your Episerver Search and Navigation index.

How do I use Scheduled Jobs?

When creating a scheduled job, you normally want to create them in their own folder, normally Project/Business/ScheduledJobs/. These do not need to interact with many other parts of the site code wise so it's okay to isolate them.

In order to make a scheduled job your class needs two key things:

• To inherit and implement Episerver.Scheduler.ScheduledJobBase
• A Scheduled Plugin Attribute with name [ScheduledPlugIn(DisplayName = "Email Recent Change list to Admins")]

We'll start by making a scheduled job to email admins about recent changes. The code below starts our scheduled job class. We've got the ScheduledPlugIn attribute with our display name, and we're inheriting from ScheduledJobBase.

As part of the inheritance, we're also overriding the Execute method.

[ScheduledPlugIn(DisplayName = "Email Recent Change list to Admins")]
namespace MyProject.Business.ScheduledJobs
{
    public class ChangeListEmailerJob : EPiServer.Scheduler.ScheduledJobBase
    {
        public override string Execute()
        {
            throw new NotImplementedException();
        }
    }
}

Next step, we'll want to add 3 important features

• Some basic logging to our scheduled job
• A way to stop it, should the server need to shutdown, or the task be halted.
• Final Log message for the history.

We'll start with adding a way to stop our scheduled job.

[ScheduledPlugIn(DisplayName = "Email Recent Change list to Admins")]
namespace MyProject.Business.ScheduledJobs
{
    public class ChangeListEmailerJob : EPiServer.Scheduler.ScheduledJobBase
    {
        public ChangeListEmailerJob()
        {
            IsStoppable = true;
        }
        public override string Execute()
        {
            throw new NotImplementedException();
        }
    }
}