How You Manage Multiple Interfaces by Creating Business Rules

When you create rules for multiple interfaces, you must be aware of the visibility settings for your custom fields and customizable menu items.

The rules engine can access all custom fields and customizable menu items regardless of their visibility settings, so all conditions and actions that use those fields and items are available to you, even if they cannot display on the interface. See Options with Interface Visibility Settings for a complete list of options.

Because the rules engine does not filter fields and menu items based on their visibility on the interface, you run the risk of setting a field or menu option that is not visible. To prevent meaningless actions and ensure that the rules engine sets the field or menu item you want it to, you can specify the interface as one of the rule conditions when you create incident, chat session routing, opportunity, and target rules. And, if the object meets certain conditions, you can use a rule action to set the interface to a different one for rule processing.

It is important that an object be processed on the correct interface because the rules engine uses the message bases and configuration settings of the interface associated with the object. For example, if you try to use an English-language interface to process an incident that was sent in German, any message bases used to respond to the incident will be in English. For that reason, it is important that objects be processed on the correct interface. Fortunately, rule actions let you set the interface when the rule conditions are met.

And although you cannot set the language or mailbox in a rule action, you can use them as conditions to set the interface in the rule. Assume, for example, you have two interfaces: one English-language interface and one German. Also assume that Techmail is scheduled to run only on the English interface. While you cannot change an incident language to German in a rule, you can change its interface. And, because the interface uses the message bases of the interface processing the rule, changing the interface accomplishes the same results.

The following rule demonstrates this:

If Incident.Language equals German
Then Set Interface Name to german_interface

See Overview of Business Rules. For examples of commonly used business rules, see Examples of Business Rules.