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.
This article contains the following sections:
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.
|
Custom Field Type |
Trigger |
Automation Conditions |
SLA |
View |
|
Drop-down Field |
|
|
|
|
|
Multi- Field |
|
|
|
|
|
Text |
|
Not Available | Not Available | Not Available |
|
Multi-line Text |
|
Not Available | Not Available | Not Available |
| Numeric |
|
Not Available | Not Available | Not Available |
| Decimal |
|
Not Available | Not Available | Not Available |
| Checkbox |
|
|
|
|
| Date |
|
|
|
|
| Regular Expression |
|
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
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
When using a checkbox within conditions, they will appear as follows:
25 Comments
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!
Would love to be able to enable multi-select fields as columns in views.
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.
It would be extremely helpful if we could include multi-select fields in our Views - not as a condition, but as a field that is displayed.
There seems to be a bit of conflicting information.
I am not sure if something is out of date or a feature was removed. But, according to Jessie Schutz here https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/218032348/comments/115001855828
We should be able to use a trigger to check the text inside of a custom text field. But, I am not able to and this article specifies otherwise.
Is there a way to turn this back on?
Hi Alejandro -
It looks like the comments from the user Jessie was responding to there were deleted, so I can't tell for sure which type of custom ticket field they were discussing, but my guess is maybe it was a different type than you're looking to work with.
Can you tell me more about what exactly you're trying to do?
Nicole,
I am simply trying to use a trigger with a custom text field. Ideally, I would have the following options: Is, Is not, Present, Not present, Contains at least one of the following words, Contains none of the following words.
So, I would be able to test for a specific word or string.
Then I would use the trigger to set another custom field value. Usually, I have to do this with a tag.
Thanks for clarifying, Alejandro.
I've verified that the article above is correct; the only trigger conditions present for custom fields are whether or not text is present.
Using tags are the best way to accomplish what you're looking for.
I think you misunderstood my previous comment.
I am using tags to update other fields but based on your response there is no way to do so as I cannot identify what was put into the custom field.
Is there another way to do this?
Did the previous feature get removed at some point?
Can I have it returned?
Nicole Saunders
Are you still there?
Can someone from Zendesk help?
Hi Alejandro,
Yes, apologies for the delay; we've experienced a huge increase in volume this week.
Different kinds of custom fields have different capabilities; custom text fields only have the ability to determine whether text is present or not.
You could restructure your ticket form/workflow to use other types of custom fields (such as mutiselect or dropdown) to trigger other fields to be completed. But I have not discovered a way to have a trigger read the test in a custom text field and set other fields from there.
Nicole Saunders
Thank you for replying, I understand the delay. It happens to everyone.
I understand that custom fields have different options based on the type of field.
But, Jessie was referring to a custom field that could search the text. Currently, in this article that is not possible on any custom field.
Did the previous feature get removed at some point?
Can I have it returned?
Hello Alejandro,
I hope you don't mind my hopping in on this one. For your question. We did not previously have the option to set a trigger to look for a specific string relative to a ticket text field. There was not a way to set a trigger to use conditions other than present/not present for a custom ticket text field. I'm sorry to share this with you.
I wonder if this could have been for the option to set a condition in a trigger to check for a comment text match based on the comment content of the ticket itself (not any fields). We have a few resource pages on how to set this, in case it's helpful to know.
Creating triggers for ticket subject matches
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/226009928-How-do-I-create-a-trigger-based-on-a-ticket-subject-
Using the Comment text condition:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000572048-How-does-the-Comment-text-condition-work-in-business-rules-
Our trigger conditions and actions reference also has a bit of information on these options:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115015611647-Trigger-conditions-and-actions-reference
@...
Thank you for responding. I have no qualms with getting help from anyone.
Your statement, "We did not previously have the option to set a trigger to look for a specific string relative to a ticket text field." may very well be true but I linked to a comment by Jessie where she explicitly stated that a trigger could do that for a custom field. The issue is that she did not specify the custom field as she was responding to someone's comment that has been deleted since.
When I linked Jessie's comment Nicole responded and stated that the custom field must be a different one than I was using. Again most people would take that as one of the custom fields had the abilities I asked about. Further, when I attempted to get to Jessie's comment, it had been made so that users could no longer view it. But, there was no indication why or that the comment was going to be hidden/deleted.
All of that being said, you are the first to respond regarding my question about the feature previously being able to be used. I will take your response as the truth and can write-off the old comment as being mistaken,
I was looking for an answer to the question I asked. While I am grateful for answers to other questions, in the end, I would prefer if my original question at least be acknowledged. You were the first to acknowledge my question within 15 days and multiple prompts.
Hello Alejandro,
Thank you for your response on this. I need to take responsibility here. Nicole and I had chatted about this post offline, and I had confirmed that I would respond to you (your comment where the wait time gap occurred). I then very honestly forgot about my agreement to do this. I apologize for this mistake on my part. I agree that waiting 15 days is far from ideal. Should you even need more immediate help with anything, please send us a ticket to support@zendesk.com. We are happy to help.
Katie,
I totally understand and mistakes happen.
I am not sure if I agree that I would get faster help from submitting a ticket.
Reference 1 a post not by me: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360044243553-Zendesk-Support-Not-Replying-How-Long-Do-I-Wait-
Reference 2 my own ticket: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360044206533/comments/360011344054
Hi Alejandro -
Yes, we have been experiencing unusually high ticket volumes recently, both in the regular support queue and here in the community, so responses have been a bit delayed.
I apologize as well for any confusion in answering your questions. I can confirm that Jessie's comment was removed; your line of questioning and reference to it raised that it could potentially be misleading and we wanted to prevent future confusion.
Nicole Saunders
Thank you for responding.
I can certainly understand the higher than normal ticket volume. All support people can definitely understand that.
If I can make a suggestion, I would communicate that in the future as it is quite confusing and irritating for customers if they do not know why they are experiencing slower responses.
In regards to the deletion of the comment, again I would suggest at least informing the person that the comment had been deleted. This could be done in private if necessary, even if you do not give a reason. From my side of things, I asked about a comment, It was then deleted and I could not get anyone to respond for 16 days. While during the same period I was getting responses from you and others on other articles.
I understand that I/anyone can come across as (insert preferred frustration term), I do believe that I can be quite understanding if things are at least explained.
I'm trying to capture the name of the light agent who's working on a ticket in a custom field, but I can't find a way to use a trigger to enter the name into a text field. I can capture it in an internal comment but can't save it anywhere? We will have hundreds of light agents which will change often, so a custom drop-down list isn't a great option unless there were a way to dynamically refresh with all current light agents. Any ideas?
Virginia Goggins
A custom drop-down list (with matching tags) seems like the most robust way -- it also allows you to create triggers based on the light agent (e.g. notifying them). That is what we do. Because of stability, we don't need to dynamically refresh the field, but it should be fairly easy to do by running a simple script using the API:
Read light agents: https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/support/end_user
Modify custom field: https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/support/ticket_fields
Modify triggers: https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/support/triggers
Hello Virginia! Great question. One alternate approach to this, if you need the field for reporting purposes. You could use Explore and construct a query to count updates by updater name. Light Agents cannot be assigned tickets, but you can capture an update made by them in Explore. Here's a recipe that I think would be a good place to start with this, if you have Explore Professional:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051027673-Explore-recipe-Counting-agent-comment-updates
Jonathan's comment is also spot on if you'd rather use the API or have a use case for capturing the Light Agent name in a custom ticket field. I'm not sure what the end goal of having the name added to a field is, but in case it's for reporting I wanted to share this :)
Thanks Jonathan and Katie. I still have some questions, so let me explain what we're trying to do. In each state there are a group of Light Agents that handle questions unique to that state. When a request is received, it's displayed in a view. One of the light agents for the state takes responsibility for the request. I need to be able to capture which light agent is responsible for each request so that a) I can show a view of all "claimed" requests and associated light agent, and b) for reporting purposes so that I can provide statistics on the number of open and completed requests for each light agent. My thought was to create a macro that the light agent would run with specific wording ("This request is mine", or something like that), then have a trigger that looks for that specific wording in the newest comment and captures the name of the light agent in a custom field. I can see that using the drop-down makes sense, and I can work around that, but how do I get the trigger to match up the light agent name {{current_user.name}} to the drop-down list?
So you need the light agent to "self-assign" ?
There's a way that is simple technically but will take work to maintain: The "mine" macro includes dynamic content such as "Ticket claimed by {{current_user.email}}" . You write (or create via API) one trigger per light agent, to detect that agent-specific string and set the custom field to that agent.
There might be a more automated way (harder technically but less maintenance), using a target or custom app, but I'm not sure without investigation (inspired by https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360049343294-Notify-an-agent-of-special-instructions-or-requirements-when-solving-tickets)
I share Alejandro's pain here.
In my case, a 3rd party system populates a Zendesk form and custom fields. One of those fields is country identifier.
What I was hoping to do is get the country identifier and set the users language so emails are sent out in the right language. I can’t do that with the current implantation.
I can’t change the field to be a dropdown as the backend system is looking for that specific field ID
I realise I am out of luck, but restricting text fields to just Present/Not Present seems like an oversight.
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