A Handy Trick with the Service Request Form Utility

This tip is for those who use the Service Request Form utility in the Helpdesk Solution.

I have been using this utility for a while now and have created several forms that have helped streamline several of our processes. One in particular is a New Hire Request Form.

After a recent barrage of New Hire incidents, one of my co-workers asked me a question. He asked me if there was a way to alter the title of the incidents.

This was the title of the incident: New Hire Request

He asked if it could be altered to look like this: New Hire Request - (the name of the new hire).

Here is the part of the Service Request Form code that is affected by this:

<control id="header">New Employee Request Form</control> 
<control id="member">NewHire</control> 
<control id="title">New Hire Request</control> 
<control id="category">Service Request\New Hire Request</control> 
<control id="priority">Scheduled Task</control> 
<control id="status">Open</control> 
<control id="comments">no</control> 
<control id="hidepriority">true</control> 
<control id="hidetitle">true</control> 
<control id="controls">50</control> 

<control id="type3">text</control> 
<control id="name3">Employee Name</control> 
<control id="width3">500</control> 

As you can see, the title was hardcoded into the form. So thinking about his request, I came up with two options:

1. Have the Managers manually fill in the title of the incident to include the name of the employee.
2. Find a way to extract the information out of control #3 which would contain the name and append it to the title of the incident when it's created.

I ruled out option 1 because I have certain rules in place that once the incident is created, certain routings and child incidents are created. Those rules are dependent on the title currently and if the Manager didn't enter the title correctly, the rule would fail.

So option 2 seemed the best approach, but the question was how?

Answer: Auxilliary Data

Someone in the forum for this utility pointed out I could use WORKITEM_AUXDATA(member,field) to set my title the way I wanted to.

I just needed to add the following to my Incident rule:

Set "Title" to New Hire Request - WORKITEM_AUXDATA(NewHire,Employee Name)

So now the Title includes the name and it is automated.