Is there a process to run a task daily

Question

I have business logic that interfaces with Drupal entities (in this case, users), and we need to generate reports off these records daily at a preset time. It would be easy for me to generate this data on-demand, but the requirements ask for a daily report.

I'm wondering if its possible in D7 to have the system schedule a specific cron task to run at a preset task over the time cron is expected to run (which right now, is every 3 hours). Another option I am considering is to have a Contrib Drush script that simply runs using the OS'es crontab/launchd. Which one makes the most sense?

Answer 1

I had to do something similar recently. The extremely simple answer I came up with was to simply keep track of the last time the function was run with a db variable.

So, in psudo code, I ended up doing something like this:

function hook_cron(){
  $now = new DateTime(date(DATE_ISO8601));
  $last_checked = new DateTime(variable_get('last_checkedvar', date(DATE_ISO8601, '0')));
  $diff = $now->diff( $last_checked );

  if ($diff->days >= 1){
    //do your stuff
  }
}

Works well for me. And it also doesn't interfere with any of the other cron tasks I have running on my site.