Our build workflows are a bit involved in the sense they sometimes have to wait on the availability of some shared resources before they can progress.
Is there a way to sort of create a "bookmark" in a build workflow and have it wait until the resource in question is available? I would hate to have to code the workflow in a way that it merely sits and executes a look every 10 seconds or so waiting for the shared resource to be available.
AFAIK, the way to do this is just as you suggest and take a "polling" approach where the workflow loops and just keeps checking on the shared resource, then waits a while and checks again.
If you look in the ALM Ranger Build Guidance they have an example of doing exactly that on Page 86 where they want the build to pause and wait for manual input (in that case they loops and keep checking for the existence of a "semaphore file").