How will smart campaign run if smart list doesn't load?

[Devraj_Grewal]

So I have a smart list that takes a long time to populate results, it's looking at SFDC activities so maybe it takes a while longer. My question is if I run a smart campaign referencing members of that smart list, what will happen? Will the smart campaign run for 0 leads because at the time no one was part of that smart list? Will the smart campaign wait until the smart list has returned results and then run?

Thanks.

[Rachel_Noble]

I'm sure there's a documented answer for this somewhere, so this probably isn't the best answer. But we've tested this a couple times with our CRM integration and it passed our testing.

[Jessica_Kao3]

I think it will run after the list populates.  But I always recommend to test test test. 

Plus you can see what happened in the results section. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

I think you're framing this in a strange way. If a SL is fetching leads, even if that takes an extended period of time, there's no moment at which the SL has 0 leads and is good to continue. If SLs continued with the last cached result set (in this case 0) that wouldn't make any sense.

In the extreme case when a SL times out completely, that would represent a SC error, not so much a "running for 0 leads."

[Devraj_Grewal]

Sanford, my apologies. Let's say the smart list should have 3 leads but is just still taking a while to fetch them. When you schedule the campaign to run, will it wait until it gets those smart list results back and then run?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

It'll wait, since the SL isn't returning 0 results, it simply hasn't returned.

Since Smart Lists are never truly computed instantly (except when you see cached results in the UI, but that should be irrelevant here) this is what's happening all the time: SL runs, SL returns results, then the Flow runs. Even if the SL runs and returns in <1 second, the Flow still waited for that to finish.

As I said, there are possible extreme cases where due to a lookup loop, memory issue, something like that a SL returns an error, but that's not the same as a result set with 0 results. Maybe there's something we haven't experienced where an SL is considered to have taken too long, but the timeout is downplayed as a result set with 0 results -- as opposed to an error condition -- so the SC exits without any apparent errors. That would be pretty buggy if so.

Like Jessica said, you can see what happened in the results section.