How to use Rules send an email with a list of nodes that fill certain conditions?

Question

I would like to send an email everyday that has a list of nodes that are filtered by certain conditions. I think the Rules module would be a good place to start.

Real Example:

• Content Type named "Issue".
• Field inside Issue that connects a user as Responsible Party for the issue.
• Field inside Issue that defines it as either "Active" or "Resolved".
• Email a list to the responsible party of their Issues that have a "Active" status.

If this can be done with Rules, what event do you have it react to? I would guess the core functionality of it would be put in a component that rescheduled itself every 24 hours. Then the action of the component would be "Send Mail". How would it grab the list of nodes that fulfill the conditions?

Answer 1

When you want to run a rule periodically, use the event Cron maintenance tasks are performed.

This will trigger your rule whenever cron runs.

See the cron documentation on drupal.org for more information on cron and its configuration.

Because this action doesn't specifically involve nodes, the next problem is loading the nodes you want to act on.

How you do that depends on which nodes you want to load the nodes. Examples are (there are likely also other ways):

• The Load a list of entity objects from a VBO View action that is provided by the Views Bulk Operations module. This was you can set up a view that lists the nodes you want to target and load the nodes from that list.
• The Fetch entity by property action. This could be used to fetch all content of a given content type.

When you have a list of entities you can loop add a loop to your actions to loop through the list and perform actions on each entity.

If you need to check perform conditions as you are looping through (like checking the value of a field on the entities) you can use the Conditional Rules module to add if blocks.

Answer 2

The previous answer (from rooby) is great, except that there is 1 thing I think that it is missing: the original question is about "every day": if cron runs multiple times a day (like every hour?), then you get multiple eMails. That's why I think the Rules Event Cron maintenance tasks are performed is not the most appropriate event. Instead I would use the "Rules Once per Day" module for that. Here is how it works (as per the comment in issue 2495775, from the module owner):

• You specify a trigger hour on the administration settings page for this module.
• The Rule trigger will then run when cron tasks are first run after the start of that hour. The actual run time will depend on your cron task timings.

So this is another way to understand/Read this:

• The "Event" will only be triggered when a cron job is run.
• And that event will only be triggered 1 time / day, i.e. "next time cron runs after the trigger hour has passed".

With that, you should be able to adapt your "rule that sends an email" to run ... once a day.