Temporary changes

A batch does not have to be permanent. A seasonal campaign, a limit raised for a holiday period or a temporary cut while a risk is investigated can all be loaded once with an end date, and the platform puts each line back where it was when that date passes. Nobody has to remember to undo it, and nobody has to upload a second file with the old values.

Dates are set on the Validity card of the file upload, under the guardrails. They apply to the whole batch, never per row, and they are not columns of the file. Adjusting a segment by a percentage has no validity card, so a temporary change is always made with a file.

The two dates

Activate after is when the batch starts to apply. Leave it empty and the batch behaves as usual: it applies when you confirm it, or right away if you tick Apply changes immediately. With a date, the batch waits and is applied on its own once that day arrives, as long as it is To review; a batch that was created To review with errors has to be applied by hand.

Deactivate after is when the change ends. Leave it empty and the change is permanent. With a date, the batch is reverted once that day is over: the last day is included, so a change that deactivates after the 10th is still in force during the 10th.

Leave both empty and you have an ordinary, permanent batch.

When you set an expiry date, a third option appears: Also restore the previous segment. On, each customer also goes back to the segment they were in before the batch. Off, they keep the segment the file gave them and only the limit and status go back. It only matters if the file has a Segment column.

The review step repeats what will happen, for example On expiry the limit and the enabled state go back to their previous values. The segment stays.

The screen refuses two windows that cannot work. An expiry date in the past is rejected, because the change would be reverted as soon as it applied, and so is an expiry that is not after the activation date. The message says which of the two happened, so you can correct the date in the form and confirm again.

The hourly check

Dates are acted on by an hourly check: once an hour, the platform looks for batches whose activation date has arrived and applies them, and for batches whose expiry has passed and reverts them. In practice, a batch is applied within the first hour of its activation day, and reverted within the first hour after its expiry day ends. Days are counted in the time zone of the browser that created the batch.

This is the part to keep in mind: the revert happens on its own. Nobody presses a button, and whoever has the batch open at that moment did not start it. The limits of those customers change back without any action on the screen, and the batch detail page does not show it happening. The result appears on the batch's Reverts row in the Schedule tab once it finishes.

The Schedule tab starts with the state of the check itself:

• The hourly check is active., with the time of the next run.
• The hourly check is paused — nothing on this list will run.
• The hourly check could not be reached. Until it is, no change activates or reverts on its own.

The last two are shown in red. While the check is paused or unreachable, every date on the list is just a date: nothing activates and nothing reverts until it is running again. If you see either message, tell your administrator.

What a revert puts back

The revert covers the lines whose limit the batch wrote. For each of them, it writes back the limit and the enabled or disabled status the line had just before the batch applied, and the segment too if you asked for it. "Just before" means at the moment of applying, not at the moment of uploading, so a batch scheduled days ahead still restores the right values.

Some lines are deliberately left alone:

• A line somebody changed during the window. If the limit of a line is no longer the one the batch wrote, someone (a person or another process) changed it after the batch. Restoring the old value would undo their decision, so the line keeps its current limit and is counted as left untouched. These lines are the only part of a revert that needs a person: they are still carrying a limit that was meant to be temporary, and someone has to decide what to do with them.
• A line whose limit the batch did not change. If the batch only enabled or disabled a line, without a new limit, the line keeps its new status after the expiry. That includes a disabled line that the file enabled while Keep disabled lines disabled was on. If a status change has to be temporary too, give those rows a limit in the file.

A line that already has its previous value counts as reverted, so if the revert runs twice, the second run does not report those lines as left untouched.

The Schedule tab shows the result as Reverted, followed by left untouched and failed when there is at least one of each. Left untouched appears in amber.

Dates and confirmation

The two dates interact with confirmation in a way that is easy to miss.

With an activation date, the batch applies on its own. The hourly check applies a batch whose activation date has arrived, whether or not you ticked Apply changes immediately, as long as it is To review. If you want to review the batch before it goes out, do it before that date, and discard it if it should not run.

Without an activation date, the expiry still runs on a clock. A batch created as a recommendation, with an expiry date and no activation date, waits for someone to apply it, but its window keeps closing. If nobody applies it before the expiry date, it can no longer be applied: the platform refuses, because the next hourly check would revert it straight away. The dates of a batch cannot be edited, so the only way out is to discard it and create it again with a new window.

Scheduled dates in the Schedule tab

Recent batches with an activation or expiry date appear in Schedule, one row per date. See Recommendations and schedule for how to read each row.

A row marked Overdue is a date that passed with nothing done. Within the hour that is normal, because the check has not run yet; well past the hour, something is wrong and the batch needs attention. A row marked Done has its date behind it, and reverted rows show their Reverted, left untouched and failed counts.