Uncertain how conditions and alert behavior work

Help and Support
1

I generally have had trouble verifying my conditions were setup correctly. I reviewed the docs, but I feel like there are gaps in the explanation of how it works. This brought up these questions:

  • If I update the conditions and refresh the monitor, should an alert be generated when nothing on the page changes? In other words, must there be a change in the monitored text to get the alert?
    • I was tweaking the conditions and tried setting them to something that should generate an alert, but it didn’t. In general, it seems difficult to get positive feedback whether my conditions are working as expected or not without waiting for a change in the page
  • For the number comparison, are we required to parse out a clean number, or will the condition find any numerical data in the text?
    • So, will $49.99 match the condition of the text having a number less than 50? Or, does it have to be parsed out to 49.99. Again, this is a tough thing to verify given the first question I have
  • For text comparisons, is there a way to look for text to exist or not, but case insensitive?

It would be really nice if the history of the text was updated with some indicator of whether the current conditions match and would trigger the alert(s).

2

I was at least able to confirm that updating the conditions and triggering a refresh won’t cause an alert unless something changes in the targeted content in some way. Providing a way to evaluate the conditions independent of changes in the content would definitely be helpful.

1 Like
3

Agreed! An easy to test the conditions will be very helpful. I have added this to this quarter’s roadmap. :slight_smile:

Re numbers, Distill will parse out all numbers in the text and use those for comparisons. Regular expression can be used for case sensitive test.

Thanks for the feedback!