I've not been able to find clear guidance for how to optimize the use of Drip Feed dispatching and/or Auto Dispatch Scheduled Job with Time Horizon. One of my colleagues told me that he has used one or the other, but not both and that using both can lead to some issues.
One of the things that is not clear to me is the Time Horizon Setting in the Schedule Job for Auto Dispatch. For example, if this is set to 1 does this mean that only Service Appointments scheduled for tomorrow or later will get set to Dispatched. For example, if a Service Appointment is created for today and scheduled today then it will not get set to Dispatched, but (if I'm understanding correctly) a Service Appointment created to Day that is Scheduled for tomorrow will get set to Dispatched tomorrow?
Does anyone have any clear guidance about this.
@Sean Ryan, You can use both drip feed and Auto dispatch job together, there would not be any issues. Auto Dispatch job can be scheduled to run at the start of the day and drip feed can take care of any appointments scheduled to the service resources in and through out the day of schedule.
Horizon in Auto Dispatch job will consider all the appointments in future within the timeframe we give as the value in it.
For example, if the horizon = 1(day), it will dispatch all the appointments scheduled from now() to now() + 24 hours in the timezone the job is scheduled to run. If your auto dispatch job runs at 8 AM every day, all the appointments scheduled from 8 AM today to 7:59 AM tomorrow will be scheduled. Any appointment scheduled before 8 AM today and after 8:00 AM tomorrow will not be dispatched.
I hope you get your understanding correct here. Please make as correct answer if so.
