Custom Ticket Fields, while incredibly useful, are not equally available as conditions across business rules and views. This article will help show you what custom field type and conditions you can use in business rules and views and how.

Note: For more detailed information on the interaction with custom ticket fields, business rules, and views, see Understanding custom ticket fields in business rules and views.

This article contains the following sections:

Permitted business rules and view conditions
About custom ticket fields in business rules and views

Permitted business rules and view conditions

The table below provides a reference for the different business rules and views conditions and their permitted custom field type.

Note: Views are only available for a limited number of custom field types. For more information on this interaction, see Understanding custom ticket fields and views.

Custom Field Type	Trigger Conditions	Automation Conditions	SLA Conditions	View Conditions
Drop-down Field	Is Is not Present Not Present -Includes all drop down values	Is Is not Present Not Present -Includes all drop down values	Is Is not Present Not Present -Includes all drop down values	Is Is not Present Not Present -Includes all drop down values
Multi- select Field	Includes Does not Include Present Not Present	Includes Does not Include Present Not Present	Includes Does not Include Present Not Present	Includes Does not Include Present Not Present
Text	Present Not Present	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available
Multi-line Text	Present Not Present	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available
Numeric	Present Not Present	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available
Decimal	Present Not Present	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available
Checkbox	Is Checked Is Unchecked	Is Checked Is Unchecked Only available if checkbox is set to add a tag	Is Checked Is Unchecked	Is Checked Is Unchecked Only available if checkbox is set to add a tag
Date	Is Is not Present Not Present Before Before or on After After or on Is within the previous Is within the next	Is Before Before or On After After or On Is within the previous Is within the next	Is Is not Before Before or on After After or on	Is Before Before or on After After or on Is within the previous Is within the next
Regular Expression	Present Not present	Not Available	Not Available	Not Available

About custom ticket fields in business rules and views

This section will provide more information on individual custom ticket fields and their availability with business rules and views.

Drop-down fields
Multi-select fields
Text, multi-line text, numeric, and decimal fields
Checkboxes

Drop-down fields

Custom drop-down field options are available for use across all views and business rules. Drop-down field options have a finite amount of predefined value options. For more information on drop-down ticket fields, see Best Practices for altering Ticket Fields

When using drop-down fields within conditions, the field will appear as follows:

Screen_Shot_2018-01-03_at_2.58.12_PM.png

Multi-select fields

Multi-select fields provide the option to choose multiple values from a list. This can then leverage the values set for the field equally across all business rules and views. You can either select to check for the presence of any value for the field or more granularly for specific values. Below you will find two examples:

Screen_Shot_2018-04-30_at_9.00.46_AM.png

If you would prefer to check for the presence of a specific value for the multi-select field, field values may be selected as individual conditions:

Screen_Shot_2018-04-30_at_9.00.41_AM.png

Text, multi-line text, numeric, and decimal fields

Custom text fields, multi-line text fields, numeric and decimal fields are only available for use as an option with triggers. It is only possible to check whether the value is present or not present. The actual content of these fields cannot be matched with any string or specific words.

When using these types of fields within conditions, they will appear as follows:

Screen_Shot_2018-01-03_at_3.00.33_PM.png

Checkboxes

Checkboxes are available across all business rules and views. For use in automations and views, you will need to ensure that your checkbox includes a tag. If your checkbox does not add a tag when checked, checkboxes will not appear as an option for use in automations and views.

Screen_Shot_2018-01-02_at_2.57.21_PM.png

When using a checkbox within conditions, they will appear as follows:

Screen_Shot_2018-01-03_at_2.54.51_PM.png

4 Comments

Jamie Danjoint
- June 30, 2018 01:47
It would be great if the "Permitted business rules and view conditions" table had a column for "View Column". I'm learning that even if a custom field type is available as a View condition, doesn't mean it is available as a View column to select. Most times I want to be able to set the field as a condition AND see the field contents within the View itself.

And to add one more layer, having a column that said "Available in Insights" would be extremely helpful. Some custom field types aren't available in Insights at all, others are but as Facts vs Attributes.

All of this plays into the decision as to what Custom Field Type you create and I've had to scrap fields that I've made and start over, because I wasn't aware of all of these elements. A bit frustrating. :)

If this information is already in a KB article somewhere then I apologize for the oversight! THANK YOU!

0
Katie D.
- July 02, 2018 21:27
Hello Jamie,

Thanks so much for your idea. The focus of this article is more centered around utilizing custom fields within the conditions of views and business rules. I do hear the need for clarification on this though! You should be able to see all custom field types (with exception of the multi-select field and credit card field) available as a column for views. Are you experiencing something different?

Our article on views contains more details on using custom ticket fields for columns:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/218032348#topic_znk_mnk_xj

For using custom fields within Insights, this article is a great place to start.

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203662446-Reporting-on-custom-fields-in-Insights-Professional-and-Enterprise-

Thank you again for sharing on here :)

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Charlie Windlinger
- December 03, 2018 21:19
Would love to be able to enable multi-select fields as columns in views.

0
Pavel Grozev
- February 15, 2019 21:09
As a B2B business, most of the important data we receive via tickets in Zendesk Support are from customers that provide us with specific numeric/integer or mixed character IDs that are of certain lengths - 15 digits/characters or so. Hence the need for us to use custom fields in our forms. It would really be nice if Zendesk finally implements the usage of functions that enable sorting of custom field data by wildcard searches or case-match searches in both views and automations. This would really help our business both in problem analysis and visibility.

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Using custom ticket fields in business rules and views