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Tag: business rules

Troubleshooting Bad Time Bombs

November 1, 2012 There are times when Rulemanager will report a bad time_bomb in the system. Although it’s easy to just ignore when this happens, it’s better to diagnose the issue to understand (and resolve) the root cause.   This post will walk through an approach to troubleshooting bad time bombs. Time Bombs   Recall that a time_bomb record is created when events happen in the system, such as a case being created or closed, workflow actions (dispatch, accept, assign, yank), etc.  Rulemanager is responsible for picking up these time bombs, and comparing them against the defined business rules in the system, to see if something should happen, such as a notification. Time Bombs Gone Bad   On occasion, Rulemanager will report a bad time_bomb. This will typically show up in the Rulemanager log file. It may also be reported via email, if your Rulemanager…

Custom Events in Clarify/Dovetail: Change Priority

September 13, 2012 I’ve talked in the past about how to create custom events in Clarify/Dovetail, and how to fire business rules based on these events.   In short, code needs to be written that creates a custom activity log and time bomb.   A recent webinar covered details on how to do this: http://www.slideshare.net/gsherman/advanced-business-rules-part2 (starting on slide #18)   For additional info, take a look at the "User-defined Business Rule Events.doc" available on the Rulemanager wiki: http://rulemanager.wikispaces.com/How-To   If you also want to create a custom act_entry record, you'll probably want a custom activity code. Here's an example: https://gist.github.com/1042796   Change Priority   One of our customers recently wanted to do something similar, but for Change Priority of a case. They wanted to be able to fire a business rule when the priority of a case changes. They needed this to work…

Watching cases in Clarify / Dovetail

July 9, 2012 I’ve had a couple of recent business trips to Europe and back, so the long flights gave me some time to tinker with a few ideas. This is my latest experiment: watching cases. It’s not uncommon that we want to keep up with what's going on with certain cases – specifically cases that are being worked by others. For example, a high priority case for a new customer may have been recently created, and even though its being worked by someone else, I still want to keep abreast of what’s happening with it. Or perhaps the customer I’m going to visit next week has a case open that I want to stay in the loop on. Or I want to follow how one of my guys is dealing with a difficult customer. The concept is that we can “watch” a…

Getting the most out of your business rules

June 20, 2012 One of my favorite features of a Clarify/Dovetail system is the business rule. Business rules, particularly notification rules, are a cornerstone of staying up to date on what's happening in your system, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.   As we've been doing more and more Clarify System Health Checks for customers, I've observed that many organizations are either over-using or under-using business rule notifications. Overuse When there are too many notifications, they become noise, and are simply ignored. I've observed many users who have setup email filters/rules that automatically file those emails away, or even delete them. With the overabundance of emails that we all get, we're forced to attack the email problem in some way - and that typically means ignoring everything that's not critical. Except emails from my Mom. And foreigners who need me to help them…

Launching Clarify via a custom clarify:// URL

June 4, 2012 The task at hand is to be able to click on a URL (such as clarify://case/12345) and that will open case 12345 in the Clarify client.   Custom URL protocols   In Windows, you can create your own custom URL protocols, which allow you to register an application to a URL.   In my previous post, I introduced a clarify:// URL protocol. Lets see how we can make that URL trigger the Clarify Client (clarify.exe) There’s a MSDN article that outlines the basics of doing this.   Basically, you create a registry key that maps the URL to the application.   And you’re URL will be passed to the application as a parameter (that’s the %1).   Here’s a sample registry entry for this: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\clarify] @="URL: Protocol handled by CustomURL" "URL Protocol"="" "CustomUrlApplication"="C:\\clarify\\11.5\\client\\ClarifyClient\\clarify.exe" "CustomUrlArguments"="\"%1\"" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\clarify\DefaultIcon] @="C:\\clarify\\11.5\\client\\ClarifyClient\\clarify.exe" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\clarify\shell] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\clarify\shell\open] [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\clarify\shell\open\command]…

Business Rule: Only notify certain queue members

March 8, 2012 This week I was posed an interesting scenario from a customer. They have certain users who need access to every queue. But, they don’t want those users to be notified when a case is dispatched to that queue. For example, lets say that the Maintenance queue has 4 members: Fred, Annie, Gary, and Steve. Fred and Annie are regular users. But Gary and Steve are part of the Network Operations Center (NOC). The NOC has access to every queue, as they need to be able to peek inside each queue to see what’s there, read the case titles, etc. But, since the NOC belongs to every queue, they get a lot of business rule notifications – one for every case that gets dispatched to a queue. But they don’t need to get all of those notifications. So how do we…

Business Rule: Only notify certain queue members

This week I was posed an interesting scenario from a customer. They have certain users who need access to every queue. But, they don’t want those users to be notified when a case is dispatched to that queue.   For example, lets say that the Maintenance queue has 4 members: Fred, Annie, Gary, and Steve.   Fred and Annie are regular users.   But Gary and Steve are part of the Network Operations Center (NOC). The NOC has access to every queue, as they need to be able to peek inside each queue to see what’s there, read the case titles, etc.   But, since the NOC belongs to every queue, they get a lot of business rule notifications – one for every case that gets dispatched to a queue. But they don’t need to get all of those notifications.   So…

Notifying the Yankee (part 2) This time with the Clarify Client

December 21, 2011 Recently I posted about how to notify the yankee, meaning the person who a case was yanked from. I showed how to make this happen within applications that use the Dovetail SDK (Dovetail Agent, Dovetail Mobile, etc.) Now, lets see how we can accomplish the same task within the Clarify Classic Client. Setup Most of the setup is the same as I covered previously. 1. Turn the participant2user pseudo-relation into an exclusive relation 2. Setup a business rule recipient alias for the “Yanked From User” 3. Create a business rule that uses the “Yanked from User” as a recipient of a rule 4. Add the participant record Add a Participant using ClearBasic To add a participant record, we can add some ClearBasic code behind form 737, which is the Yank form. Caution: this is an old-school C form, so much…

Notifying the Yankee

October 31, 2011 Last we left off, we turned a pseudo relation into an exclusive relation. Specifically, we created a participant2user relation, which allowed us to traverse from an activity to the user who participated in the activity with a path like: focus_obj2act_entry:fact2participant(role_code=1):participant2user:login_name Real World Usage As promised, lets give this some real world usage. Specifically, lets use this to notify someone when a case (or other workflow object) is yanked from them. A few years ago, I showed how to implement yank notifications by email. In that post, I gave some details about the challenges behind using a business rule to do this: The problem with implementing this as a business rule is that there is no data that holds onto the previous owner. Clarify's solution to this is to have the Classic Client always send an integrated Notifier message (insert into…