This is a short entry for a simple feature that I know folks have been asking for for a long time. Did you know that in ColdFusion 8 - you can now pause and resume scheduled tasks? In the past you had to either delete the task or change the URL to something else. Now all you need to do is click a pretty little button in the admin:
The second icon in this screen shot is the pause control. Click it and it will switch to a resume control.
I missed this feature even though I thought I had read the release notes carefully.
Archived Comments
I'm so glad they finally added this feature - I only wish there was a better mechanism to let you know that a task is paused besides the icon change. The icons are so small, and with hundreds of tasks on a server, it can be difficult to tell what's paused and what's running (sortable columns would make this a lot nicer). I'd suggest an additional table column for the status (active vs. paused).
I filed ER's for these a while back, but it doesn't look like either will make it into 8.0 (assuming anyone at Adobe agrees with me ;-)
When I want to pause a task in CF7/6/etc I just change the start date to Jan 1 2100. Then when I want it to run again, I put it back to the next date it should run.
Yeah, there always were the start/end dates. So to indefinitely pause a task, I set the end date to something in the past. If I know when it needs to resume, I'd leave the end date blank and set the start date to the future date when it should resume.
It seems the pause functionality would be most handy for when you need to pause a task for just a short period of time during a day. For instance, if I just need to pause it for an hour or few when it's a task that runs every x minutes or hours.
7 years later...(and this is still the top Google result for "coldfusion scheduled task pause"):
We're doing a CF11 upgrade for a client where I've cloned all of our CF9 VMs and installed CF11, restoring settings from a CAR.
There are a set of scheduled tasks on the CF11 boxes that I don't want running yet - they fail due to reverse compatibility issues. I paused them.
I woke up this morning to find that they were happily running, throwing errors, and filling my boss's inbox all night. After further testing, pause seems to do nothing on 11.
Small update: pausing works fine on my local machine, even with simulating the clone's state of having a scheduled task restored from a CAR that contains URL characters that the new Quartz scheduler considers invalid. No idea why it's not working on the prod box, and I don't have time to dig further: setting task end dates to a historical date and moving on.