Playlist schedules are now built from rules you can read

Scheduling a playlist used to mean filling in a condition builder and then trusting that the result said what you meant. If a playlist had three rules, working out when it actually played took some reading.

The Schedule tab (Playlists > a playlist > Schedule) now lists each rule as a line of plain text, naming the dates it covers, the days of the week it runs on, and the hours it plays, instead of a form you have to read back to yourself. Above the list, an Effective schedule block states when the playlist plays once every rule is taken together. A playlist with no rules says so directly: “Always active. This playlist plays on every screen, every day, all day.”

Editing a rule opens a dialog split into Dates, Time of day, and Days of week, so you work on one part of the schedule at a time and watch the sentence update as you go.

Rules that will not do what you meant say so

A schedule can be self-contradictory in ways that are invisible until nothing plays. Each rule now carries its own status:

• Never plays, for a rule whose conditions cannot all be true at once, such as a date range that contains none of the weekdays it allows
• Expired, for a rule whose end date has passed
• Pending, for a rule that has not started yet

Dates can have exceptions

A rule can now exclude individual days inside its own range, which is the difference between a QSR menu board that runs every day of the year and one that runs every day except December 25. Excluded dates show as removable labels under the date range, so a closure that moves is one label to swap rather than a schedule to rebuild.

Schedules the rules can’t show

A schedule created through the API that the dashboard can’t read at all stays read-only, as before, with the same notice. A schedule the dashboard can read but can’t turn into rules, or one too large for the editor, is now read-only too, with a notice saying it is too complex to show as rules. The old condition builder let you edit some of these in the dashboard; now they can only be changed through the API. Either way the playlist keeps playing exactly as it did.