Schedule method call repeatedly?

🚧 Developers Coding Questions
1

I need to schedule a method to execute repeatedly, at a certain time of day selected by the user as an input of an app. I see a few apps do this:

input name: "timeInput", type: "time"...
schedule(timeInput, handlerMethod)

But that's confusing because it doesn't seem to match up with the developer documentation, which says the schedule method accepts a cron string. I'm pretty sure the time input is not a cron string. So, assuming that the above code works, why is that? Is the time input actually a cron string or does schedule accept something other than a cron string despite the developer documentation?

Update: I'm getting this error when attempting to execute the above:

groovy.lang.MissingMethodException: No signature of method: java.lang.String.call() is applicable for argument types: (java.lang.String, java.lang.String) values: [2020-06-19T12:50:00.000-0400, handlerMethod]
Possible solutions: wait(), any(), trim(), dump(), size(), find() on line 235 (updated)

I suspect it's because the string argument is not a cron value as indicated in the documentation. But it's confusing that other apps use this...

2

I don't see anything in Hubitat's docs about this, but SmartThings allows this and I've used the same format you show above without problem. Here's the example from the ST docs:

preferences {
    input "theTime", "time", title: "Time to execute every day"
}

def initialize() {
    schedule(theTime, handler)
}

// called every day at the time specified by the user
def handler() {
    log.debug "handler called at ${new Date()}"
}

Could there be another problem? Did you put the name of your handler method in quotes (don't)?

3

Ah, I just realized I defined a local method called "schedule"....oops. That fixed it so that it works. But it's still working in a way that is not documented for Hubitat. Guess it's a relic of smartthings. I'm glad because it's easier to use the time input than it is to conver to a cron string