Suggestion for support for ISO8601 2004 edition recurring interval defined jobs

Community Support
1

Hi,

I was wondering if there is any community interest in support for setting up workflows based on an ISO8601 recurring interval string rather than the less-flexible cron job or less-concise Temporal Schedule API?

In the 2004 revision of the ISO8601 spec shown at https://www.iso.org/standard/40874.html, the option for representing recurring intervals by prefixing a R/ or Rn for limited repeats like R8/ and postfixing a duration like /P6M (every 6 months) was introduced. This seems to dovetail better into the features of the Schedule API without the drawbacks of using a cron-expression.

I’m curious if there is interest in temporal.io supporting this method of setting up future/repeating-future jobs as an alternative to Schedule or Cron Job. Thanks!

Some examples of ISO8601 values:

  • R/PT1H = Repeat every 1 hour indefinitely.
  • R5/PT15M = Repeat every 15 minutes for a total of 5 occurrences.
  • R/2026-02-19T16:30:00Z/P1D = Repeat every 1 day indefinitely, starting from February 19, 2026, at 16:30:00 UTC.
  • R/P1W/2026-12-31T23:59:59Z = Repeat every 1 week indefinitely, working backward from the end date of December 31, 2026, at 23:59:59 UTC.
  • R3/2026-03-01T08:00:00/2026-03-01T09:00:00 = Repeat the 1-hour window (08:00 to 09:00) a total of 3 times consecutively, starting March 1, 2026.
2

Interestingly, in some ways the 2004 ISO8601 spec is more-flexible than the temporal CalendarSpec, so I guess perhaps some options might have to be rejected, such as:

  • Complex periods like > 1D or > 1W, that couldn’t be described in the schedule API
  • Granular times past the second-level