title: $:/plugins/OokTech/TimerActions/readme

!! What does it do?

You create scripts made up of action widgets and then the plugin runs the
scripts at specific times.

Options include:

* Periodic (Run every n minutes/seconds/hours/days)
* Run once after some interval (run once after 10 minutes have passed)

You can open the `Manage Timers` tab in $:/plugins/OokTech/TimerActions to
start, stop or edit existing timers and the `New Timer` tab to create new
timers.

!! How to use it

Open the `New Timer` tab. Using the from there give the timer a name (the name becomes a tiddler title so the same restrictions apply). Select the timer type (periodic or countdown), give a period for the timer and finally set the
action widget that make the script.

After defining the script (or scripts) open the `Manage Timers` tab.
The select timer input can be used to select a specific timer, or you can pick
show all and then find the timer in the list.
Click the `start` button next to the name of the timer you want to start.

!! Limits

This runs in the browser, so the actions only happen if the wiki is open in the
browser.

The accuracy of the timer is limited. It is possible to make it accurate to the
millisecond, but that could be very processor intensive because the process has
to check if there is a task to run every millisecond. The default is to check
every second, so at most the task could be delayed by one second. If you don't
require precision than it may be a good idea to make that even longer and
switch to 5 or 10 seconds.

!! Internals

Each scheduled action has a tiddler that defines it. The tiddler text should
contain the action widget script to execute. It uses the same thing as the startup actions, so anything that works there should work here too.

* `timer_type` can be `periodic` or `countdown`
* `period` if the `timer_type` is `periodic` this is the period, if it is `countdown` than this is the length of the countdown.
* `start` the timestamp for when the countdown/period starts for `periodic` and
  `countdown` types.

!! For The Future™

* Add another timer type that runs at a specific date/time.
* Add another timer type that runs periodically based off of calendar events
  (like every monday, or every day at 10am, etc.)