I am posting this small entry because it took me quite a time to compute all informations to programmatically add tasks in Windows using pywin32, so this post should be an helpfull example.
The process to schedule a task is as follows:
- create an instance of the COM TaskScheduler interface
- adding a task within the task scheduler
- adding a trigger within the task
Here's how it can look in Python, to create daily tasks:
import pythoncom, win32api
import time
from win32com.taskscheduler import taskscheduler
def create_daily_task(name, cmd, hour=None, minute=None):
"""creates a daily task"""
cmd = cmd.split()
ts = pythoncom.CoCreateInstance(taskscheduler.CLSID_CTaskScheduler,None,
pythoncom.CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER,
taskscheduler.IID_ITaskScheduler)
if '%s.job' % name not in ts.Enum():
task = ts.NewWorkItem(name)
task.SetApplicationName(cmd[0])
task.SetParameters(' '.join(cmd[1:]))
task.SetPriority(taskscheduler.REALTIME_PRIORITY_CLASS)
task.SetFlags(taskscheduler.TASK_FLAG_RUN_ONLY_IF_LOGGED_ON)
task.SetAccountInformation('', None)
ts.AddWorkItem(name, task)
run_time = time.localtime(time.time() + 300)
tr_ind, tr = task.CreateTrigger()
tt = tr.GetTrigger()
tt.Flags = 0
tt.BeginYear = int(time.strftime('%Y', run_time))
tt.BeginMonth = int(time.strftime('%m', run_time))
tt.BeginDay = int(time.strftime('%d', run_time))
if minute is None:
tt.StartMinute = int(time.strftime('%M', run_time))
else:
tt.StartMinute = minute
if hour is None:
tt.StartHour = int(time.strftime('%H', run_time))
else:
tt.StartHour = hour
tt.TriggerType = int(taskscheduler.TASK_TIME_TRIGGER_DAILY)
tr.SetTrigger(tt)
pf = task.QueryInterface(pythoncom.IID_IPersistFile)
pf.Save(None,1)
task.Run()
else:
raise KeyError("%s already exists" % name)
task = ts.Activate(name)
exit_code, startup_error_code = task.GetExitCode()
return win32api.FormatMessage(startup_error_code)
You can see an example of usage here, in the iw.win32 package we have started to build, to gather all win32 specific Python things.