Understanding the Text Tray

The text tray enables users to complete forms, emails, and chat sessions without entering repetitive data. The text tray is a home for boilerplate text that users can insert into specific fields. Standardized phrasing ensures quality and consistency in data entry, and the use of quick keys as data entry shortcuts maximizes efficiency.

This table lists the applications and fields from which you can invoke text tray entries:

Each entry in the text tray has two parts: the full text that is to be inserted into the field and a short code that a user can type in place of the full text. This short code is called a quick key.

When users memorize quick keys, they can type a quick key directly into the field where the boilerplate text belongs and then use the Alt+M hot key to make the system substitute the full boilerplate text. A designated symbol (as delivered, the symbol is #) indicates the start of a quick key; this ensures that the system does not replace words that coincidentally appear in a text tray-enabled field but are not intended as quick keys. For example, if “hello” is a quick key for a standard greeting, the standard greeting will replace only the text #hello, not the unprefixed word “hello.”

Alternatively, users who do not remember the quick keys and hot keys to use can click a toolbar button (or use a hot key) to display the text tray page in a new window. The text tray lists the available quick keys and the first few words of the associated boilerplate text. Moving the cursor over the quick key link displays the full text as a tool tip. Clicking a quick key places the associated text at the end of the text tray-enabled field (not at the cursor location).

Administrators can create public quick keys that are available to any user with security access to the text tray. To keep individual text trays manageable, the only public quick keys that appear in a user's text tray are those that the user has explicitly added. Administrators should notify users when new public quick keys are available.

Users can also create private quick keys for their own use. Although a user's text tray might include a private quick key and a public quick key with the same name, the public quick key takes precedence, and therefore the private quick key is effectively invalid until the user gives it a unique name. Users receive a warning message when they personalize their text trays in a way that creates this conflict, regardless of whether the private or public quick key was in the text tray first. Administrators do not receive error messages when they create public quick keys that duplicate existing private quick keys.

Administrators create categories for text tray entries; these categories help to keep the list of entries manageable. Administrators can filter by category when they review existing public keys, and users can filter by category when they review the public quick keys that are available to add to their individual text trays.

The categories also appear in the text tray window to help users choose quick keys that are appropriate to the current context.

PeopleSoft delivers a category called Personal that is automatically assigned to all private text tray entries. PeopleSoft delivers the Personal category as system data.

Public text tray entries can be static text, or they can include tokens that will be dynamically resolved when the entry is used. For example, if your organization experiences the same problems on a consistent basis, you might create a text tray entry such as “{customer} is experiencing a service outage.” In this example, the text in brackets is the token. The system substitutes the customer's name when the full text is applied.

Variables in a dynamic text tray entry are terms that you create using the Active Analytics Framework (AAF). Because end users are not expected to have the access or the training to work with AAF terms, private text tray entries do not support dynamic text.

At run time, the system checks the dynamic quick keys that are in the user's personal text tray. If dynamic quick keys are present, the system determines whether it can resolve the AAF terms in the current context.

If the system cannot resolve the AAF term in the current context, it does not display that dynamic quick key in text tray. For example, a user might have a dynamic quick key that uses terms from the case context and some static quick keys. The user navigates to the Email component. On the Email page, the system does not display the quick keys that use the terms having the case context. It only displays the static quick keys. The unresolved term in the boilerplate text does not appear.

PeopleSoft does not support dynamic quick keys for Chat. Chat uses HTML and cannot use PeopleCode to resolve AAF terms. Dynamic quick keys are not limited to Case, however. You can use dynamic quick keys for Inbound Email and Outbound Email components.

PeopleSoft does not deliver AAF contexts for Inbound and Outbound Email; therefore, these contexts do not appear in contexts drop-down list boxes. You can, however, create AAF contexts for your email components and use dynamic quick keys for your email.

Users are given access to text tray functionality through the delivered permission list CRRB1810. Users with roles that have that permission list can access all end-user text-tray functionality: they can access all public quick keys and can create private quick keys. Administrators can not secure individual public quick keys.

When users who do not have text tray permissions access a text tray-enabled page, the text tray toolbar button and the text tray hot key are not available. The hot key for merging is not specifically disabled, but as long as the user has never had access to the text tray, no quick keys will be available for merging.