What happens if I make changes to a template used in repeating jobs?
We are often asked: "If I change my original repeating Jobs template, will these changes flow through to the repeating jobs?"
The answer is - it depends on when your repeating jobs are created.
When you set up repeating jobs you enter a number of days and a time when you want your next lot of repeating jobs to be created.
Repeating jobs that are programmed in the Repeating Jobs Rules to occur in the future, but have not yet been created will change to reflect the changes in your template.
Repeating jobs that are have been created and have a job number in vWork will not reflect the changes you have made to your template.
Note: This also applies to repeating schedules set up for equipment.
Why does it work this way?
If you made a change to a field that has a value in it and the template then updated repeating jobs that had vWork Job Id numbers (created jobs) - then all those jobs would fail. For example, if you deleted a field that had a start-time, then these jobs wouldn't work as the start-time field would not be there to tell the job when to start.
To prevent this from happening repeating jobs was set up to make sure changes would only flow through to jobs that had not been created and created jobs would be left alone. This ensures created jobs continue to work following the rules set by the template before it was changed.
What does this mean for how I manage Repeating Jobs?
If you are making a big change to your repeating jobs then you will need to replace the existing repeating job schedule with a new schedule based on the changed template. This is normally quite a quick task as everything is in the template and it is just the scheduling information that you need to update.
This also applies to equipment on a repeating schedule.
Exception
There is one exception for a change to a template. This applies to fields where a change to the field does not impact the structure of the repeating jobs. For example, if you change job labels on a template, these will update on repeating jobs with vWork Job Id numbers as this change has no material impact on how the jobs are scheduled or undertaken.