Send alert if smart group contains any contacts

Question

The problem:

I'm trying to monitor daily for contacts meeting certain criteria, and would thus like to have a way to receive a scheduled email if a smart group contains contacts.

Possible solution: Using CiviReport?

CiviReport supports scheduled delivery of reports, configurable under a report's "Email Delivery" tab.

Is there a way to avoid sending the report if it contains no rows?

Alternately, I could do something in cron with drush sql-query or some such, but ideally I'd like to do this within CiviCRM.

Other options:

Are there other to achieve this goal within CiviCRM that would not require custom code?

Answer 1

We've done just this using CiviRules and CiviReport, though the solution does still send emails if the smart group is empty.

I've outlined the steps here: https://civicrm.stackexchange.com/a/4873/105

Answer 2

Have you tried using CiviCRM Rules integration? Not sure if it would work in the context of a scheduled job, but it can send emails.