Do I have to implement the schedulable interface even if I only need it to run once and schedule a daily job?

Question

I feel like i'm missing something basic here, I wrote a batch class that should be scheduled to run daily at a certain time of the day, forever.

Do I really have to create an additional class that implements schedulable + a test class just to run it once? Am I missing something? Is this my only option here?

I thought System.scheduleBatch method might be helpful but according to the docs it only runs once.

Answer 1

If you want to schedule apex within Salesforce, you need to implement Schedulable - even if it is just to run daily. Then, you can write a cron expression to schedule it how you'd like or use the UI to schedule it as well.

There's also now Scheduled Flows which presents another option although I believe it's limited to 250,000 flow interviews a day so you need to take that into account.

For your question, you could create a separate class to handle scheduling or you could have the same class that's implementing Database.BatchableContext implement Schedulable. You'd do something like this:

public class BatchSchedulableClass implements Schedulable, Database.Batchable<sObject> {

    public String Query;

    public BatchSchedulableClass(){
        Query = 'SELECT Id FROM Account';
    }

    //for the schedulable to execute the batch class (this class)
    public void execute(SchedulableContext ctx){
        Id batchJobId = Database.executeBatch(this,100);
    }
   
    
    public Database.QueryLocator start(Database.BatchableContext BC){
        return Database.getQueryLocator(query);
    }

    public void execute(Database.BatchableContext BC, List<sObject> scope){
        //do logic here
    }

    public void finish(Database.BatchableContext BC){
        //do any finishing for the batch job here
    }
}