Time Entry & Email: Scheduling and Notifications Built into Your Pipelines

Time Entry is an entry processor that starts a pipeline based on time.

It supports common scheduling styles:

• simple intervals (e.g., every 15 minutes)
• cron expressions (e.g., “every weekday at 08:00”)
• time zones (because commerce does not run on UTC feelings)

If you’ve been building scheduled integrations for years, you already know why this matters:

• fewer external schedulers
• fewer scattered jobs across servers
• schedules live with the pipeline definition
• everything is trackable and observable in one place

{
  "id": "time_entry",
  "type": "Qilin.TimeEntry",
  "config": {
    "scheduleType": "Cronjob",
    "cronExpression": "0 */15 * ? * *",
    "timeZone": "Europe/Berlin"
  }
}

That’s “every 15 minutes” in a predictable time zone.

No separate infrastructure. No mystery scheduler running on an old VM “because it always worked”.

The Email Processor does what it says:

• sends email to one or more recipients
• supports To / CC / BCC
• allows dynamic values from pipeline execution context
• supports templates via Scriban (so emails can be personalized and structured)
• uses stored credentials (so you don’t paste SMTP passwords into configs)

This becomes useful immediately for:

• failure alerts
• daily/weekly summaries
• “import finished” notifications
• “data quality issue detected” reports
• agency handover and operational transparency

A simplified config:

{
  "EmailProviderName": "CustomSmtpProvider",
  "credentialId": "credential-guid",
  "Receivers": { "raw": ["op*@*********ny.com"] },
  "From": { "raw": "qi**********@*********ny.com" },
  "Subject": "Qilin pipeline alert",
  "BodyContent": "Pipeline {{ FlowObjectAttributes.entry.pipelineId }} reported {{ FlowObjectAttributes.entry.status }}",
  "IsBodyHtml": false
}

You can also use templating to include richer context:

• object IDs
• execution IDs
• counts (how many items processed / failed)
• links to tracking pages

A scheduled pipeline without notifications is a silent machine.

A notification system without scheduling becomes reactive chaos.

Together, they enable a very traditional – but very effective – operational pattern:

1. run predictable jobs on predictable rhythms
2. surface exceptions immediately
3. let humans focus on decisions, not polling dashboards

• scheduling lives with the pipeline definition
• templates are versionable, testable, and dynamic
• credentials are managed centrally and permissioned
• fewer “sidecar services” just to send emails or run cron

• Merchants: get operational transparency without extra tooling
• Agencies: deliver “managed integrations” with built-in reporting and alerts
• Investors: these are features that reduce support cost and increase platform stickiness

In October we’ll tackle a very modern problem with a very classic pattern:

moving large binary data through pipelines without moving it through pipelines.

(Yes, that sentence is weird. It will make sense.)

Some of the best engineering work is turning “how we always did it” into platform primitives.

Time Entry and Email are exactly that: practical tools for real operations, baked into Qilin.Cloud.