Scheduling an an R script that shows a popup/message box in case of an error on Windows

Question

My aim is to check the http status of a website every 5 minutes and throw an alert message in case it is not 200. To keep it simple, I would like to discuss my question based on the piece of code given below.

library(httr)

a <- status_code(GET("http://httpbin.org/status/404"))

if (a == 404) system('CMD /C "ECHO Client error: (404) Not Found && PAUSE"', 
                 invisible=FALSE, wait=FALSE)

The last bit that begins with system found on

https://heuristically.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/popup-notification-from-r-on-windows/

and

Show a popup/message box from a Windows batch file

The lines above results in

This is a message box from C:\windows\SYSTEM32\CMD.exe poping up that says:

Client error:(404) Not Found

Press any key to continue...

Is there a possiblity to add Sys.time() along this message?

Using the taskscheduleR I scheduled the script above. To get help see:

http://bnosac.be/index.php/blog/50-taskscheduler-r-package-to-schedule-r-scripts-with-the-windows-task-manager-2

library(taskscheduleR)

myscript <- "the address of your r script"

taskscheduler_create(taskname = "myfancyscript_5min", rscript = myscript, 
                 schedule = "MINUTE", starttime = "11:20", modifier = 5)

In this case the message box I get is shown below. Note that this time it is without the message.

How can I get the message written when I run the script using the task scheduler?

Answer 1

You just need to edit the first part of the code. As advised in the comment we will make use of notifier:

https://github.com/gaborcsardi/notifier

In case you have issues with installing the notifier, I was only able to install it through the command below.

devtools::install_version("notifier")

Replace the first bit with the following:

library(httr)

library(notifier)

a <- status_code(GET("http://httpbin.org/status/404"))

if (a == 404) notify(
                 title = "404",
                 msg = c("Client error: (404) Not Found")

)