| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
| July 9, 2024 | July 9, 2024 | July 10, 2024 |
Zendesk is pleased to announce powerful new placeholders on lookup relationship fields for tickets, ticket requesters, ticket organizations, and custom objects.
This announcement includes the following topics:
What is changing?
Placeholders are a powerful way to surface data and unlock many complex workflows with ticket triggers, macros, and object triggers. Until now, you could only retrieve a lookup relationship field's ID and name. With this release, you can now use placeholders to retrieve field values of a lookup relationship's target record.
This functionality unlocks use cases such as:
-
Ticket triggers and macros
- Sending a customer an email notifying them of a contract end date when the contract is almost expired:
{{ticket.ticket_fields_1234567890.custom_fields.end_date}} - Creating a side conversation with the ticket requester's manager when approval is required:
{{ticket.requester.custom_fields.manager.email}}
- Sending a customer an email notifying them of a contract end date when the contract is almost expired:
-
Object triggers
- Sending customers an email with a link to your product's help center when they register a purchased product:
{{custom_objects.myproduct.custom_fields.productpurchase.custom_fields.helpcenterurl}}
- Sending customers an email with a link to your product's help center when they register a purchased product:
In most cases, lookup relationship placeholders support one "hop" into the target object. However, ticket requester and ticket organization fields are special cases because they are standard ticket fields that function as lookup relationship fields.
For more information, see Using placeholders.
Why is Zendesk making this change?
Zendesk is striving to make custom data more usable to you and unlock more powerful workflows for you within Zendesk. Enhancing placeholder support for lookup relationship fields and custom objects is a powerful step toward those goals.
What do I need to do?
The new placeholders are available to all accounts. However, to unlock more powerful use cases, we recommend using custom objects.
If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.