Russell,

My understanding is that onTrigger() will be called based on the scheduling of 
the processor, regardless of if there is an incoming flowfile. A couple of 
examples support this line of thought — “source” processors like GetFile, 
GenerateFlowFile, etc. run according to their schedule even though they will 
never receive a flowfile. Similarly, in ExecuteScript, the first task is always 
to attempt to retrieve a flowfile from the session and then yield execution if 
none is returned.

We may be able to add more explicit information to the Developer Guide, but I 
would suggest looking at Performing the Work [1] and When Processors Are 
Triggered [2] as they cover this topic. It seems in your case, your processor 
will either have no incoming connections, or you’ll need to add the 
@TriggerWhenEmpty annotation to your processor.

[1] 
https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/html/developer-guide.html#performing-the-work
 
<https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/html/developer-guide.html#performing-the-work>
[2] 
https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/html/developer-guide.html#when-processors-are-triggered
 
<https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/html/developer-guide.html#when-processors-are-triggered>



Andy LoPresto
[email protected]
[email protected]
PGP Fingerprint: 70EC B3E5 98A6 5A3F D3C4  BACE 3C6E F65B 2F7D EF69

> On Jun 8, 2017, at 3:45 PM, Russell Bateman <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I'm doing something I've never done before in a custom processor. I'm writing 
> a processor that will awaken every /n/ minutes, query a database, perform 
> work as indicated by the result of the query, then go back to sleep for /n/ 
> minutes.
> 
> This processor will never expect a flowfile because it doesn't work on 
> flowfile attributes or content. It may, I think, emit some flowfiles 
> downstream.
> 
> Will onTrigger()be called without a flowfile? That point seems unclear in the 
> Developer Guide. Or is there some other lifecycle, like @OnScheduledthat I 
> should expect to use for this?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Russ

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