Best Practices for Notifications and Escalations

Notification and Rule Names

  • Notification and rule names must be unique across all applications and auxiliary tables.
  • The notification name will appear in e-mails using templates with the $NOTIFICATION() template tag. For details, refer to $NOTIFICATION().
  • For newly deployed workflows, several notifications and rules are provided, and the names of each notification and rule are prepended with the first letter of up to three words from the workflow name. You can remove these prefixes as needed, but they do help organize your notifications and rules when an application has multiple workflows.
  • If you have an escalation that is supposed to stop when an item is closed (moved to an inactive state), the termination rule could be ignored if two transitions are executed in close succession (such as Resolve and then Close) because the escalation is being created and closed in one notification cycle. In this scenario, consider adding a condition like AND NOT Active/Inactive Is Equal to Inactive to the end of your initial notification rule. This will cause the Close transition to be used as a terminator, thereby ensuring that the notification is not sent repeatedly.

E-mail Template Maintenance

To ease maintenance of e-mail templates, create a base e-mail template that includes the most of the tags you need for all of your notification e-mail messages. Use conditional tags in this base template to customize the generated information based on whether the notification relates to primary or auxiliary items, user privileges, and more. Use this base template as much as possible, reserving new e-mail templates for situations that cannot be handled by conditional tags and user settings. For details on e-mail template tags, refer to E-mail Template Tags.