Setting Up Additional Recipient Restriction Conditions

Setting Up Additional Recipient Restriction Conditions

Additional restrictions can be used to provide greater flexibility in determining which users will receive notifications. The condition used for the additional restrictions can achieve this by excluding or filtering out selected recipients, leaving only a subset of selected users (filtered recipients) identified by the condition to receive notifications.

For example, if you had a Press Ticket and want to notify the Press Operator assigned to the Ticket each time a change is made to it, you would select as recipients the group to which all Press Operators belong. If this is all you did, every time a Press Ticket was changed, all Press Operators would receive a notification. Obviously, this would generate too many meaningless notifications and force each Press Operator to spend an inordinate amount of time reviewing notifications which s/he is not interested in. To resolve this, a condition can be defined that limits the recipients of the notification to only the Press Operator that is currently assigned to the Press Ticket.

One important point to keep in mind when devising the condition used to place additional restrictions on recipients is that it can only be used to filter out the selected users/groups assigned to the notification as recipients. In other words, it cannot be used to select a user who is not also selected in the recipients list. This is because the condition is evaluated against each user selected in the Selected Recipients list. Only users for whom the condition evaluates to "True" will receive the notification.

Setting additional restrictions on recipients

1. Click the Recipients tab in the Notification's display pane if it is not already selected.
2. Click the Edit Condition button ( ) in the Additional restrictions on recipients area of the Recipients tab. A condition editor dialog box will appear, allowing you to specify which database fields, operators, and values you want to include in the condition. By default, the condition used for additional restrictions on recipients is set to "None". If a notification routine is saved with no additional restrictions on recipients, notifications will be sent to all users/groups selected in the Recipients Group/User list.

3. Click the plus button ( ) to change the default condition ("None") to a custom condition. A new condition line will be added to the condition editor.

4. Select a database field on which you want to base the first operand of the condition from the database field popup. The fields available are determined by those defined for the folder/document type for which the notification routine is based. Often, the selected database field used as the first operand in a condition for restricting users will be a field used for indicating a user (for example, an Employee field used in the form for assigning a CSR to a Job).

5. Select the relational operator you want to apply to the database field from the relational operator popup. The operators available depend on the database field selected, but may include: starts with, contains, does not contain, equal, not equal, less than, less than or equal, greater than or equal, and greater than.

6. Specify the second operand. This is the field or value that will be evaluated against the first operand by means of the relational operator.

To limit recipients by using the Recipient() MetaScript object, the first operand must correspond to a user of the system. If used, the syntax of the Recipient() MetaScript object must match the syntax of how the selected user is stored in the database field on which the first operand is based. See "Using the Recipient() MetaScript Object" for additional details.

To compare the value of the database field used in the first operand to a constant value in the second operand, type the value in the text field, or click the expander ( ) to the right of the text field to select a value. The values available depend on the database field selected.

To compare the value of the database field used in the first operand with the value of another field, click the expander ( ) to the right of the text field, select Switch to field, then select the appropriate database field as the second operand. The fields available are determined by those that are defined for the folder/document type for which the notification routine is defined. You can also switch back to entering a value in a text field by selecting "Switch to values" from the database field popup.

Note: If a field used in the condition is deleted, an error notification will be sent to the Administrator alerting him/her that the Notification is improperly configured.

7. OPTIONAL: To add additional criteria to the condition, click the Plus button ( ), select either AND or OR, and repeat Steps 4-6 for each additional criterion you would like to include in the condition.

note: In the Virtual Ticket system, AND has a higher priority than OR in all conditions. For example, the condition

Criterion1
and Criterion2
or Criterion3

will be interpreted as "(Criterion1 AND Criterion2) OR Criterion3". A notification routine with the above condition will send a notification to a selected recipient when Criterion1 and Criterion2 are both true, as well as when only Criterion3 is true.

If you would like the condition to be interpreted as "Criterion1 AND (Criterion2 OR Criterion3)", you must define it as follows:

Criterion1
and Criterion2
or Criterion1
and Criterion3

A notification routine with this condition will send a notification to a selected recipient only when Criterion1 is true and either Criterion2 or Criterion3 (or both) is true.

8. Click OK ( ). This will close the condition editor.
9. Click Save ( ). This will save the changes you have made to the notification routine.

At this point, the condition used to apply additional restrictions on recipients has been defined, and you may resume defining the Notification routine.

Related Topics

About Notification Processing

Defining Notification Routines

Setting Up Notification Conditions

Setting Up Additional Recipient Restriction ConditionsThe Notification Box

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