In our case we have set up a job that tries to download the file from today that contains the date in the filename. That works perfectly with your date/time variable unless the people that is suppose to publish the file to the ftp-server has published the file to late. In that case the file does not exist, but VisualCron reports status "Success" even if the file is not there.

If the file exist, the feedback is this:
ftp> GET OCR.D031108
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for OCR.D031108.
226 Transfer complete.
ftp: 2132 bytes received in 0,01Seconds 193,82Kbytes/sec.
ftp>

If the file does not exist, the feedback is this:
ftp> GET OCR.D031109
200 PORT command successful.
550 *** ERROR *** NO BATCHES FOR TRANSMISSION
ftp>

If something goes wrong on the ftp-server the error is almost always “550” followed by some kind of message (differs from ftp-server to ftp-server). Here are also some error examples:
ftp> get suse
200 PORT command successful
550 suse: Not a regular file
ftp>

ftp> get crap
200 PORT command successful
550 crap: No such file or directory
ftp>

If you could just look for the 550 (error) and 150 (success) you could also parse the actual error to the result-variable.

I have similar ftp tasks set up, and there's an easy way to get the results you want.

1) Set up an execute task o run the DOS command "echo 'sucess'"
2) Set a condition that checks for the file and executes the task if the file exists.

you can do the same for failures as well.



Alternatively, you can break out the FTP file download into its own task. Then use conditions to check for the file. If the file doesn't exist locally wait 60 seconds and retry the download.