How to enable notification rules

Notifications

A Notification is an alert that you create on a view to send users an email when a change has been made to a record, or records are added to or removed from a view. They provide an excellent way of ensuring that users are notified when changes have been made to a record and that the appropriate people in a workflow process always receive immediate notice when a record is ready for the next step in a process.

For example, let’s say you need to track the status of an invoice. When a new order is received, the status of the invoice would read as ‘New’.  An alert can be sent to the processing department to prepare the invoice for shipping. Once the status is changed to ‘Processed’, the shipping department will be notified to ship the package. When their workflow is complete, the status is changed to ‘Shipped’, and a tracking number can be added to the record to complete the workflow process.

To create a notification rule for a view:

1. Open a view you wish to receive email alerts from, then select the 'View Options' Menu icon,  then click Notification Rules. Note: Your view must contain the record id for notifications to send. 

2. Give your notification a name.

3. Next, select the conditions for which you wish to receive the notification.

a. This can be any time a record is added to a view, removed from the view, or if any change is made to a record in the view.
Note: Notification emails are only triggered when the record is directly updated by a user.  This does not include records that move in or out of views due to the passage of time or through cross-table calculations.

b. You can also specify to receive notifications based on changes to a specific field in the view. This would be helpful if an email number is updated and you need to update the corresponding information in your personal phone.

4. On the Recipients tab, choose who will receive the notification. You may select yourself, other TrackVia Users, or a group of users in a specified role.  If you are creating a notification for a view that uses an "is current user" filter, notifications will only get sent to the user that is assigned to the record.  Please see the section below titled Sending Notifications to the Assigned User for more information on setting this up.

5. Lastly, you have the option to personalize the notification email the recipient receives by entering a name in the From Name and a custom Subject Line.

Tip: If setting up multiple notification rules, as a best practice we recommend adding the title of the view to the subject line.

For further customization, in the Delivery Options you can include system-owned field names from the table in the subject of the message.

Example: {identifier} updated from {itemName} on {updateTime}

What the recipient would see: Joey updated from Contacts on 04/23/2014 3:53PM

6. Upon completion, click Save and Finish.

Once the notification has been saved, it will be added to your list of notification rules. You will have access to the notification rules you created.

Notification Rules

The Notification Rules contain a list of any notifications you have created for the current view. From here you have the ability to delete, add, or mute an existing notification. Muting a notification temporarily suspends the rule from sending an alert without completely removing it.

What does my notification email look like?

The end user will receive an email that looks like the image below. The email will include the personalized subject and a brief summary of the changes. For quick access to the record, the record id and the name of the view will link directly to the corresponding information in your app. The notification will also have a note in the bottom stating "This email was generated from a rule configured by username@yourdomain.com". The email address listed will belong to the creator of the notification.

Notifications and Permissions

In cases where a user does not have permission to access a view, yet they are selected as a recipient of the notification, a message will display stating that certain users do not have permission to access the current view and will not receive notifications.

Sending Notifications to the Assigned User

There are many instances where you may only want to send notifications to the users that are assigned to the record.  This is a simple process and requires two steps to set up.  The first step is to create a view that uses the "is current user" filter.  You can find more information about setting that up here.  After you have created the filtered view, simply create a notification for that view and include all recipients that may be assigned to records.  You can either do this by selecting a role that they are all a part of or by selecting everyone individually.  While you are setting the notification up to send to everyone, it will only be delivered to the user that was assigned to the record that triggered the notification.