Cron Jobs with hyphens (-) failing in Clarity and throwing System error

Products

• Clarity PPM SaaS
• Clarity PPM On Premise

Issue/Introduction

Cron jobs having hyphens are erroring when the job properties are opened. 

 

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
Steps To Reproduce: 
1. Login to a Clarity env
2. Navigate to Home - Reports and Jobs - Available Jobs
3. Select any job, eg. Time Slicing
4. Click on Job and set below in the Job Properties
  When: Scheduled
  Start Date: 3rd June
  Start Time: 12:00
  Set Recurrence: 30 6 5-10 * * (Use UNIX crontab entry format)
5. Save and Return
6. Submit
7. Under Jobs - Scheduled Jobs tab, search for the above job
8. Click on the job
Expected: The job properties opens up without any error
Actual: The below error message is thrown
Workaround: Cancel the existing schedules using hyphens and reschedule it using commas

Environment

16.2.1 , 16.2.2

Resolution

This is not a bug. The cron format that Clarity uses is "cron like". It's not adherent to the strict cron format. Clarity doesn't support days of month as a dash separated list (5-10 or 10-20, etc.) Clarity never did. You have to provide a comma separated list detailing all the days in the range you want, i.e., 5-10 becomes 5,6,7,8,9,10 and 10-20 becomes 10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18.19,20