Post

2 followers Follow
0
Avatar

Interact - Duplicate Emails

Use Case

 

We have multiple "Support" mailboxs at hachette for one of our Publishers. We have build some Outlook macros to format incoming emails and push them to Interact to be logged as Requests. This works and is fine.

The issue lies when a user emails multiple support boxes for the SAME query (i.e. they just want a quick reply). Currently our Outlook Macros will forward to every email and interact will log each email as one Request. So if a user emails 3 Support mailboxes there will be 3 Requests (2 being duplicates).

My idea was to extract the MessageId from the header which is unique for all of the emails (even though they are delivered to different mailboxes) and store this against each Request that comes in. The idea was in Interact was to use FindObject to check to see if the Request already exists with that MessageId (im storing the email MessageId in our $C_ExternalSystemId field). Example:

FindObject('EnhancementRequest',$C_ExternalSystemID,RequestedMsgID) = null

Now the Interact rule doesnt find any duplicates because I'm presuming the transactions are being processed at the same time, so there isnt a transaction to query. Which is fine.

I thought about creating a WORKFLOW on record creation to check, but i see that FindObject method doesnt exist for Business Rules/Workflows.

Is there any other method of locating existing records I could use?

Gareth Bradley Answered

Please sign in to leave a comment.

2 comments

1
Avatar

Hi Gareth,

 

That's a very interesting use case, and I can think of two ways to overcome the problem:

1. Use a numeric variable, and count the number of recipients to determine whether you want to create the request or not (this is a short explanation since your message shows deep knowledge), but I would happy to elaborate more if needed.

2. The other option (which I haven't tested), is to populate the MsgID as ExternalID of the request. The reason is the ExternalID (as SYSID) is unique across system, and therefore Clarizen will inherently block the creation of another object with the same ExternalID. I am not sure if the End User will get and error or not. You might want to combine that with FindObject to avoid end user error message problem.

 

Please let me know whether one of those options might work.

 

Good luck!

Tamir

Tamir Avital 1 vote
Comment actions Permalink
0
Avatar

hey Tamir

 

Option 2 worked a dream. Us Admins get an email message concerning duplicate IDs, but I can filter those out of my outlook! Diamond

Gareth Bradley 0 votes
Comment actions Permalink