Re: [Task Scheduler] scheduling flexibility

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 2:15 PM, Kis, Zoltan <zoltan.kis@intel.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 4:01 PM, John Mellor <johnme@google.com> wrote:
> > Do you have other use cases for time-sensitive tasks that wouldn't
> involve
> > showing a user-visible notification?
> >
>
> Automatic scheduling of a telephony call(back) in case of busy tone.
> Tolerates delay in the range of a few seconds, but not in the range of
> minutes. There is no notification, the dialer takes care of visuals.
>

If the dialer is the foreground app, then it can just use setTimeout,
rather than scheduling background tasks. If it needs to be able to do this
from the background, then perhaps it should require some privileged
"consume additional battery in the background" permission.

Similar use case is (optional) automatic re-sending of failed messages
> on protocols that do not support re-sending from a server.
>

Since the app doesn't know when an internet connection will next be
available, wouldn't this be better handled by an inexact scheduled task,
where the browser can wait till the network is available?

Or, better yet, we should introduce a separate browser API that lets you
request a long-running up/down-load be performed in the background, with
automatic retries (and resuming if the device reboots). Then the browser
can handle such use-cases with a lightweight single-purpose process, rather
than having to periodically wake up the entire web runtime just so you can
poll the network from JS.

Scheduling network connection attempts.
>

Ditto.

Other cron-like scheduled jobs (expirations, things requiring action
> from user, etc), which when activated, need to be in [close-to] exact
> time. Could these be done via calendar events?
>

Things requiring action from the user presumably already show user-visible
notifications. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by expirations - are they
really time-critical?


> Regards,
> Zoltan
>