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Application Rules

In this section we will create the application rules to manage our submissions. Our application rules will allow those who are part of the IT department to edit the submission while restrict others to view only permission.

The Application Developer Privilege

Users who create application rules must have the Application Developer permission. Rather than check this privilege on the user's User Information Form (UIF), it is recommended that you create a group named Application Developers and check that privilege on that group then assign your conference creators to that group.

Editing Documents vs Messages

It is never good practice to allow anyone to edit messages in a conference. This is a potential security issue that is beyond the scope of this tutorial. Just trust me. To get around this, we can use an application rule that will turn a submitted message into a Document and then we can allow our moderators to edit documents.

  1. Open the Rules folder of your conference and click on New Application Rule
  2. Change the title to Change to Document
  3. Verify that the trigger field is set to Message Received
  4. Change the Condition to Always
  5. Change the action to Set object type to Document

The Untouched Field Problem

For efficiency purposes, FirstClass does not know about any fields on a form unless they are touched by the client. Since the status field has not been touched, the server does not know it exists, so when we send a message to our conference, the icon is not displayed in the conference list. We can fix this problem by using an application rule to punch in the default value of our icon field (1017) on both the form (object) and in the list (item). We can modify the Change to Document rule to add these actions.

  1. Add an action to set field 1017 to the yellow LED icon (2027) in the form
  2. Add an action to set field 1017 to the yellow LED icon (2027) in the list

Unprotect the IT Dept Only group

We will set permissions so that only the IT Department can edit the form, but we must first check the hidden checkbox that will make the IT Dept Only group editable. We do this by adding one more line to our receive rule by setting the value of field 1016 to 1 in the form (Set in Object)

 

Create a Reply when completed

When the work order is completed, you can have a reply automatically sent back to the person who submitted the request. This will only be initiated if the status field (Field 1014) is set to value 2 (completed)

  1. In the Rules folder of your conference create a new Application rule and title it Reply when Complete
  2. Set it to trigger when the Item is Modified
  3. The condition is when a field with ID# 1014 in the form (object) is a number equal to 2
  4. The action is to generate a reply with fixed text Your work order is complete