Trigger types and condition logic

Automations are only as reliable as their entry conditions. If the trigger is too broad, noise floods the channel; if it is too narrow, important events never fire. This article surveys the trigger types and condition logic you will combine when building serious workflows in Dailybot—think of it as a map, not a click-by-click UI manual.

Time-based triggers

Cron-style schedules express “run at these clock moments” using patterns the product documents for your workspace (minute/hour/day/month/day-of-week style semantics). They are ideal for digests, reminders before standup cutoffs, and housekeeping jobs like archiving stale threads.

Recurring intervals (“every N hours”) suit lightweight polling or heartbeat checks when wall-clock alignment matters less than steady spacing. Pair either style with an explicit timezone so global teams do not get surprises when daylight saving shifts.

Time triggers do not read team mood; they simply open a window for the automation to evaluate whether other conditions pass—often in combination with events captured since the last run.

Event-based triggers

Check-in completed fires when a participant submits or when a round closes—depending on how you configure the automation. Use it to acknowledge submissions, route blockers to a triage channel, or update dashboards.

Agent report received connects automations to coding or task agents that post structured summaries into Dailybot. That event can kick off approvals, ticket creation, or manager notifications when a report mentions risk keywords.

Blocker detected (or equivalent workflow signals) listens for semantics or fields that indicate impediments. These triggers are powerful for ops: they turn unstructured frustration into routed work without waiting for a manual @mention.

Event triggers shine when you want causality: something happened in the system, so react now—rather than waiting for the next cron tick.

Condition-based triggers

Sometimes the schedule or event is only half the story. Condition logic filters on the payload: text contains a phrase, a numeric mood score falls below a threshold, a tag equals customer-escalation, or a custom field matches a value.

Conditions make automations context-aware. Example: “When check-in completes and free-text contains ‘outage’ and team is Platform.” Without conditions, every completion would ping the same place.

Pay attention to case sensitivity, tokenization, and language: matching “blocked” may miss “bloqueado” unless you model multilingual patterns or use structured fields instead of raw substring checks.

Compound conditions: AND, OR, and grouping

Real policies rarely fit a single clause. Dailybot-style automation builders typically allow:

• AND: all predicates must pass (severity high and owner is empty).
• OR: any predicate passes (keyword “P1” or priority field equals urgent).
• Nested groups: (A AND B) OR (C AND D) for escalation matrices.

When you nest groups, name them in comments or documentation—future you will not remember why parentheses were arranged that way. A readable pattern is to mirror the runbook language your ops team already uses (“page if customer impact and no incident commander”).

Example: complex configuration patterns

Incident warm path: Event = agent report received; condition group = (contains incident OR tag sev-1) AND business_hours == false; action = page on-call and post to war room.

Manager digest: Time = cron weekday 08:30; condition = “at least one blocker in last 24h for team X”; action = DM lead with rollup links.

Quality gate: Event = check-in completed; condition = mood below threshold AND previous mood also below threshold for same user (two-strike); action = schedule 1:1 template.

These examples illustrate composition: time opens the door, events provide freshness, and conditions enforce proportionality.

Operational discipline

For any non-trivial trigger set, maintain versioned notes: who owns it, what breaks if disabled, and how to test. Use dry runs or staging workspaces when available. Triggers are code in product form—treat them with the same respect you give deployment hooks, and your automations will stay fast, quiet, and trustworthy.