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Create alert rules

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Getting started

Before you set up an alert rule, decide when or in what situations you want to receive alerts. When you know which event you want to be notified about, find the page where the data that causes that event appears. The event can be a date that arrives or a specific change that occurs. Therefore, you must find the page where the date is specified, or where the field that changes or the new record that is created appears. After you have this information, you can create the alert rule.

When you create an alert rule, you define the criteria that must be met before an alert is triggered. Criteria is basically the match between the occurrence of an event and the fulfillment of specific conditions. When an event occurs, the system starts to perform a check according to the conditions that are set up.

Ensure the alert batch jobs are running

The batch jobs for data change and due date alerts need to be running for the alert conditions to be processed and the notifications to be sent. To run batch jobs, go to System administration > Periodic tasks > Alerts and add a new batch job for Change based alerts and/or Due date alerts. If a long and frequently running batch job is needed, select Recurrence and set No end date with a Recurrence pattern of Minutes and a Count of 1.

Events

The event that triggers an alert rule can be a date that arrives or a specific change that occurs. Triggers for events are defined on the Alert me when FastTab of the Create alert rule dialog box. The events that are available for a particular field depend on the trigger that is selected.

For example, if you're setting up an alert rule for the Start date field, due date events are appropriate. Therefore, the is due in event type is available for that field. However, for a field such as Cost center, a due date event isn't appropriate. Therefore, the is due in event type isn't available. Instead, the has changed event type is available.

Event types

Three types of events can occur:

  • Create-type and delete-type events – These events trigger an alert when a record is created or deleted.
  • Update-type events – These events trigger an alert when the data in a specific field changes.
  • Due date-type events – These events trigger an alert when a date arrives.

Changes that occur can be initiated by a user. For example, a user changes the delivery date of a purchase order. Alternatively, changes can occur as part of a process. For example, the Status field on a page changes to reflect the life cycle of various processes in the system.

Conditions

On the Alert me for FastTab in the Create alert rule dialog box, you can use conditions to control when you're alerted about events.

For example, you can specify that the system should alert you when the status of purchase orders changes, but only if the status matches a specific set of conditions. Specifically, you want to be alerted when the status of a purchase order is set to Received. This change in status is the event that triggers the alert.

Next, you must decide which purchase orders you want to be alerted about. For example, you can select one of the following options. These options define the conditions for the alert rule.

  • Current selected record – You receive an alert when the status of a specific purchase order changes to Received.
  • All records – You receive an alert when the status of a purchase order is changed for an item in the active page view. You can use the advanced filtering that is available on the page to create rules for a specific set of records. For example, you can create an alert that is triggered for all purchase orders for the customers in a specific customer group.

Expiry of rule

On the Alert me until FastTab of the Create alert rule dialog box, you can specify how long the alert rule should be active.

Alert contents

On the Alert me with FastTab of the Create alert rule dialog box, you can specify the subject text and message text that the alert messages should use.

User ID

On the Alert me with FastTab of the Create alert rule dialog box, you can specify which user should receive the alert messages. By default, your user ID is selected. The ability to change the user receiving the alert is restricted to organization administrators.

Alerts as business events

You can send alerts externally using the business events framework. When creating an alert, set Organization-wide to No and set Send externally to Yes. After you have the alert triggering the business event, you can trigger a flow built in Power Automate using the When a business event occurs trigger on the finance and operations connector, or explicitly send the event to a business events endpoint via the Business events catalog.

Create an alert rule

  1. Ensure the alert batch jobs are running (see above).
  2. Open the page that contains the data to monitor.
  3. On the Action Pane, on the Options tab, in the Share group, select Create alert rule.
  4. In the Create alert rule dialog box, in the Field field, select the field to monitor.
  5. In the Event field, select the type of event.
  6. On the Alert me for FastTab, select the desired option. If you want to send the alert as a business event, set the Organization-wide value to No.
  7. If the alert rule should become inactive on a specific date, on the Alert me until FastTab, select an end date.
  8. On the Alert me with FastTab, in the Subject field, accept the default subject heading for the email message, or enter a new subject. The text becomes the subject heading for the email message that you receive when an alert is triggered. If you want to send the alert as a business event, set Send externally to Yes.
  9. In the Message field, enter an optional message. The text becomes the message that you receive when an alert is triggered.
  10. Select OK to save the settings and create the alert rule.

Limitations and workarounds

Workaround for creating alerts for the secondary data sources of a form

You can't create alerts for some secondary data sources on forms. For example, when creating alerts on the customer or vendor posting profiles form, only the fields on the header (CustLedger or VendLedger) are available and not the dimension accounts. The workaround for this limitation is to use SysTableBrowser to open that table as primary data source.

  1. Open the table in the SysTableBrowser form. 
    	https://<EnvironmentURL>/?cmp=USMF&mi=SysTableBrowser&TableName=<TableName>
  2. Create an alert from the SysTableBrowser form.

Change based alerts do not work for batch status changes

Change based Alerts does not work with batch status changes because it is turned off for performance reasons. Instead, you should set up the Batch alerts capability. For more information, see Set up alerts for batch enhanced forms.