Sending an email reminder to a user group

Question

Hello, 
 I am basically looking for something very similar to triggers in databases. 
 In my asset management app, employees have been assigned some assets. Some assets have a returnOn date. 
 I want to send email reminders to every employee (employee user group)u if any of their assets is approaching their return date. Maybe 1 day before the returnOn date. 
 I am aware of the escalations and exceptions in the process model. But I do not need to do anything else just send email reminders. 
 What will be the best approach for this? 
 Any help is appreciated. Thanks!!

Sanchit Gupta (Xebia) · Answer

You can create an expression rule to get all the assets whose return day is 1 day after the current date. Then create a scheduler process with Timer Recurrence set to Daily at some time in which you fetch all the assets closing to their returnOn date using the created rule and use OOTB Send E-mail smart service to send emails to Employee group if there is any asset returned by the rule o/w end the process.

Sanchit Gupta (Xebia) · Answer

1. You can configure your process model to launch an instance automatically at a certain time with the recurrence interval and other conditions set in the Start Event triggers >> Timer Event on Start node. Please check out documentation on how to configure a timer trigger on a Start Event . 
 2. No, Although you can use it but I would not recommend, instead you should add a Script Task node and call an expression rule in the node outputs which will get you all the assets approaching to their return date. 
 3. Appian provides OOTB Send E-mail smart service which you can use to send emails to the Employee group users. 
 There is no such thing as Loop node, if we want to repeat the execution of some nodes in our process then we can create a loop flow and control it using gateways. 
 Another way to perform an iterative task in process model is to configure Multi-Node instances for the node in question, in your case, Send E-mail node. If we want this action to be performed on a list of items then we can create a subprocess for these items and configure MNI on Subprocess node in main process.