Retrieve RSS feed vs Watch RSS feed items

[gandalf]

What I’m trying to do

1. Monitor an RSS feed (generated by Google Alerts)
2. Watch for new items in the RSS feed
3. Check for new items in the feed every few hours
4. If there are no new items, end the Scenario.
5. If there are new items, grab data from just the first item (doesn’t matter if there are multiple new items) and continue on with my automation

What I’ve tried
Scenario A: Retrieve RSS feed as the first step in a Scenario every X num of minutes

Scenario B: Watch RSS feed items as the first step in a Scenario that also runs every X num of minutes

Issues
Scenario A runs predictability, but often the first item in the RSS feed has not changed, so every often my automation runs on the same piece of content. I get duplicates in my final output.

Scenario B works great if I manually run it. It checks for new items, stops the automation at the first step if there’s nothing new and continues on if there is. However, for some reason, Scenario B is not running automatically on my timer. I can’t figure out why. It only works if I manually trigger it, even though it’s set on a schedule.

Questions

1. Am I missing something simple for Scenario B?
2. Is this the best way to solve this problem?

Screenshots

Scenario A:

Scenario B:

[Donald_Mitchell]

Hi @gandalf,

How do you know Scenario B isn’t running every 5 hours as you’ve specified?
The feed only updates when there’s a new Google Alert that has been added to it since the last time it ran. If it runs, but finds nothing, then that counts as a “Check Run”.

In your scenario history, there’s an option on the top right corner that says something like “Show Check Runs”. If you enable that, you might be more instances of your scenario running, but only using 1 Op because it checked the RSS Feed and found nothing to operate on.