CA Service Management Tuesday Tip by Jon Israel, Sr. Support Engineer for 3/22/2011
Many of our customers use whats known as the Maileater interface to open, and upate tickets within Service Desk. This past week, I was working on an issue in which a customer wanted more information on what fields could be updated by sending an email into maileater, and we have gotten the question a few times in the past as well, so I figured I would post it here to share with everyone.
Maileater works via two components - the mailbox rules, and the text_api.cfg. The mailbox rules determine whether a ticket is created, or an existing one is updated. Once maileater filters out the email based on the mailbox rules, it then sends the information to the text_api to parse out the body of the email and digest any of the attributes specified, and either opens or updates a ticket based on those attributes.
That said - the best way to find out what fields exactly can be updated via maileater, simply open up your text_api.cfg file (using a standard text editor), located in your $NX_ROOT\site directory. Do a search for the word "KEYWORDS" or simply scroll down the file until you get to the KEYWORDS section. Here you will see a list of all of the updatable attributes that text_api can look for. You will see different sections as you scroll down, starting with Requests, then Change Orders, then Issues.
So for example, you will see the following under the section for Request's keywords:
REQUEST.DESCRIPTION=description.STRING
So for this example we will use the Description field. We will also say that we already have an mailbox rule set up to make maileater open a Request based on the word "Request" in the subject line. Now, lets say you want to send an email in to open a new ticket, and you would like to set the Description to read "I cannot access email via my web browser using firefox"
To do this, simply send an email into mail eater with a subject of "Request" and the following in the body of the email:
%DESCRIPTION=I cannot access email via my web browser using firefox.
We dont need to put %REQUEST.DESCRIPTION as based on the mailbox rules - it will already know which object it is going to create or update. We only need to tell it which fields in that object to populate or update.
When maileater recieves this email, it will apply the mailbox rule telling it to create a new request. It wil then send the information into the text_api which will parse out the body for keywords - in this case it will pick up the %DESCRIPTION keyword, and will continue opening a ticket with the specified text in the description field.
This can be done for any ticket as long as the mailbox rules are configured correctly, and the emails being sent in have the appropriate and correct attributes on them based on the text_api configuration file.
I hope this helps anyone out there who has had this question before :-)
Enjoy the week!
Jon