Workflow scheduling on particular working day of the month in ADB

[maurya_vish24]

Hi,

I am looking to schedule a workflow to execute on 3rd working day. Working day here would be Mon-Fri of each month. I could not find any direct crontab solution but have created watcher file solution for it. Below code will create a watcher file at every 3rd working day of the month and this code is added as a task in workflow and subsequent tasks in the workflow will be dependent on it. The problem in this solution is that I will have to schedule this workflow at least 4-5 times every month because 8th working day will fall in between 9-14th of every month and out of these 4-5 times only 1 time it would succeed and rest 4 will appear as failed job in workflow history which is never a good design. Can somebody help me here? It would be great help.

#code to check if the calander date is working day 9 or not

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

import calendar

import sys

today = datetime.today()

year = today.year

month = today.month

# Count business days from start of month until today

business_day_count = 0

current = datetime(year, month, 1)

while current <= today:

    if current.weekday() < 5:  # 0=Mon ... 4=Fri

        business_day_count += 1

    current += timedelta(days=1)

print(f"Today is business day #{business_day_count}")

if business_day_count == 3:

    print("Today is the rd working day → Continue workflow")

    date_stamp = datetime.now().strftime("%Y%m%d")

    # Create file path with timestamp

    file_path = f"/mnt/refined/workday_check/pipeline_log_{date_stamp}.txt"

    # Create empty file using dbutils.fs.put

    dbutils.fs.put(file_path, "")

    #dbutils.notebook.exit("STOP")

else:

    print("Not the 3rd working day → Stop workflow")

    dbutils.notebook.exit("STOP")

Thanks,

Vishal

[bianca_unifeye]

Hi Vishal 

You’re right: there’s no single Quartz cron expression that says “run on the 3rd working day (Mon–Fri) of every month”. Quartz can handle “Nth weekday of month” (like 3#1 = first Wednesday), but not “Nth business day regardless of weekday”, so you do need a bit of logic around it

The good news: you don’t need 4–5 schedules or a bunch of failed runs in history. You can:

1. Schedule the workflow every weekday, and

2. Use a small “gate” task to decide whether to continue or skip that day

3. Make non-3rd-working-day runs show as Succeeded & Skipped, not Failed.

Have a look here

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78661662/i-would-like-to-create-a-cron-schedule-in-databricks-th...

1. Schedule once: every weekday

In the job trigger, use a weekday schedule, for example:

• In the UI: Advanced schedule → Every Mon–Fri at 09:00

• Cron example: 0 0 9 ? * MON-FRI

This way the job runs daily on business days only. 

2. Gate task: compute the 3rd business day and exit cleanly

Make your current notebook the first task in the workflow (e.g. check_3rd_workday).
Slightly tweak it so that:

• It sets a task value with the result

• It exits successfully on non-3rd days (no exception), so the run is green, not red.

Example:

from datetime import datetime, timedelta today = datetime.today() year, month = today.year, today.month # Count business days from start of month until today business_day_count = 0 current = datetime(year, month, 1) while current <= today: if current.weekday() < 5: # 0=Mon ... 4=Fri business_day_count += 1 current += timedelta(days=1) is_third_workday = (business_day_count == 3) print(f"Today is business day #{business_day_count}") print(f"is_third_workday = {is_third_workday}") # Expose result to the workflow dbutils.jobs.taskValues.set(key="is_third_workday", value=is_third_workday) if not is_third_workday: print("Not the 3rd working day → skipping downstream tasks") dbutils.notebook.exit("SKIP") # exits SUCCESSFULLY else: print("3rd working day → continue workflow") dbutils.notebook.exit("RUN")

Key points:

• dbutils.notebook.exit(...) ends the task as success (unless you raise an exception).

• dbutils.jobs.taskValues.set(...) lets downstream tasks read is_third_workday. 

So your run history will show this task as green every weekday; the “non-3rd” days are just short runs that exit early.

3. Only run the “real” pipeline when is_third_workday == true

You have two main options:

Option A – If/else condition task (recommended if available)

If your workspace has the If/else condition task:

1. First task: check_3rd_workday (the notebook above).

2. Second task: type = If/else condition, expression like:
   {{tasks.check_3rd_workday.values.is_third_workday}} == "true"

3. Attach your real workflow tasks to the true branch only.

Result:

• On the 3rd working day: condition = true → branch with your main pipeline runs.

• Other days: condition = false → that branch stays skipped; entire job shows as succeeded with most tasks greyed out.

[Poorva21]

Use dbutils notebook exit("SKIP") instead of exiting with an error.

In Databricks Workflows:

EXIT with "SKIP" → treated as SKIPPED

EXIT with "STOP" or raising an exception → counted as FAILED

Modify your code like this:

if business_day_count == 3:

print("Today is the 3rd working day → Continue workflow")

else:

print("Not the 3rd working day → Skip workflow")

dbutils.notebook.exit("SKIP")

Now your workflow can be scheduled every weekday without generating failures.

This is the simplest fix.