Using Conditions to Get Alert On Important Changes

You can set conditions on your monitor to notify you only when the conditions match. Conditions are case insensitive in Distill.


  1. You are monitoring a stock price whose current value is $70. You would want to be notified only when the stock price falls below $65. In this case you can set condition, if text has number less than <65.
  2. You have added a monitor with some texts. You want to be notified when the text changes to “alpha” or “alpha” appears in the selected monitored element. You can set if text has alpha.

How to add or delete conditions?

Following are the steps to add conditions on the monitor:

Step 1: Click on context menu button of the monitor. It will open up the menu with some options.

Conditions - Distill Web Monitor

Step 2: Click on “Edit Conditions” from the menu. It will open up the Conditions window.

Step 3: Click on “Add Condition” to add or delete button to remove condition.

Conditions - Distill Web Monitor

Available conditions in Distill

Selections from the web page can contain characters, numeric or other data types. In add conditions, you can choose either “Text” , “Added text” and “Previous text” from the drop-down as shown below in the image.

Conditions - Distill Web Monitor

“Text” and “Added text” refers to current version of text and additions that could have been made to it. “Previous text” refers to the second most recent version of the text selected in the page. For example, if the originally text was “hello world” that changed to “hello world!”, the values used in conditions will be as follows for each type of text:

  • Text: hello world!
  • Added text: world!
  • Previous text: hello world

Selecting the type of text will depend on your use-case. “Added text” makes sense when you are monitoring a list of items. For example, you are monitoring IMDB top 5 movie of the month which keeps on changing. Currently, top 5 movies are: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, omega. You want to get notified when “zeta” appears in the list. After some time it changes to alpha, beta, delta, zeta, omega. Here if you add condition text has zeta or Added text has zeta both will work. After some time it changes to alpha, beta, delta, zeta, omega, gamma. If the condition is text has zeta, then you will get notification. But this notification is redundant as you received the notification for appearance of zeta earlier. You will not receive notification if you choose “Added text”. So, here Added text has zeta is a better choice.

Another dropdown list in the condition window shows various option as shown below:

Conditions - Distill Web Monitor

  • is not empty : The text/selection sometimes goes empty and you won’t be interested in notification for those empty texts. This condition comes handy in those cases.
  • has: You can use it to match the text with certain text (word, number). When that certain text appears in your monitor, you will get notification.
  • does not have: It works similarly like “has” condition.
  • has number less than (<): It can be used when your monitored selection is of numeric type.
  • has number more than (>): It is used for numeric type selection.
  • has number that decreased more than : Only used for numeric data type selection. Suppose your monitor has text “50”. You want notification only when this text goes below 40. You can use this condition has number that decreased more than 10.
  • has number that increased more than: This works in a similar way as above condition.
  • matches regular expression: You can use this condition to match regular expression in your text. This can also be used to match case sensitive text.

Compound Condition

You can use compound condition for multiple combinations of conditions. For example, your text currently is “50”. You want to get notified either if it goes above “60” or it stays between “41-45”. The image given below shows this case:

Compound conditions

You can add compound condition by clicking on down caret icon adjacent to add condition button as shown below:

Add compound conditions