Workflow and ServiceDesk Community

In helpdesk my email template for worker getting a ticket was:

Service Desk has Opened the following Ticket:

Ticket #: workitem(workitem_number)
User Name: workitem(contact_name) (workitem(contact_nt_id))
User Phone: workitem(contact_phone)
Location: workitem(contact_location)
Department: workitem(contact_department)

Current Assignee: workitem(assigned_to_worker_name)
Created on: workitem(workitem_created_on)
Description: workitem(workitem_title)
HISTORY_LIST[[
$$workitem_version$$ - $$workitem_modified_on$$ - $$modified_by_worker_name$$ - $$workitem_action$$
Assigned To:$$assigned_to_worker_name$$
$$workitem_comment$$
]]

link:    http://ServerName/aexhd/worker/Default.aspx?cmd=viewItem&id=workitem(workitem_number)

Lossing the comment history not too bad, but lossing the contact phone number?

I also loss the ablility to ask the user is this the right phone number in the affected user email about a ticket being open.

half of our user are not at city hall and for the techs not to have phone numbers when out and about is a big thing. 

Are there more avalible fields that what is listed? 

Is there an advance email template guide?

Are more fields going to be avalible after the mp update?   

There are no additional variables available with the e-mail templates then whats show in the template editor. I'm unaware of any additional variables being added with the upcoming MP release.

Well if there's nothing out of the box, you could always create a new workflow and send the ticket to it when you want to send an email. That would allow greater customization of what you want to be included in the email.

When we need to send email in our ruleset actions, we send to a workflow that I built. It gets all of the incident data as well as the affected user data, so that it is available for any number of email formats you might need. I just created a separate model in the project for each use-case, and made them invocation targets so you can call them as methods from the ruleset actions.

If you do that then doesn't it mean it's not using the email templates created in Service Desk and you're implementing your own templates outside of it?

Correct. I find it much easier to build out an email template in workflow than the SD template builder anyway. Also, if you already have SD templates built, and want to switch to this method, you can simply copy and paste the HTML from the SD template into the HTML of the workflow email component, and just swap out the variable references.

I don't find the email templates too useful in 7.5 as it's missing too many variables that are not on the list and the fact that you can't sort them on the email form in the order you want is not very good. I think it would be too cumbersome to have to check every single variable and replace it but I'm curious to know how Service Desk does it in the back end.

By replace, if you were referring to my last comment, I meant that when you copy and paste the HTML from the SD template into the workflow email component, the variables you used in the SD template show up as literal text. You don't need to map out and replace every variable available in the process. It's actually dead simple to delete the text, and drop the appropriate variable from workflow in it's place. Of course, if you are using tons of variables in your SD template, then yes, it could be tedious, but one could easily replace 20 or so in under a minute. Otherwise, it might be easier to just start from scratch in the workflow component rather than copy and paste.

I used the" send incident to workflow template" video as a guild and am getting ticket info and with a "search user" to getting phone number and address, but I can not seem to get equipment list, contact list or sla information. 

Also how do you get the ruleset data mapping pulled into workflow.

Sorry got sla information with "Get Sla Process By Milestone" component.