This is where you create new Alert Types and edit
existing ones.
When creating a new Alert Type:
- Select an Object
- The object you select will be the subject of the events that will
trigger your alerts. After selecting an object, click the Next
button.
- Select an Event Type
- Select an event type relevant to the object you selected before.
It is the triggering of the type of event you choose here that will
in turn trigger your alert. This screen also requires you to choose
a name for your alert type. The name can be anything you want.
Finally, you must select the owner of the alert type. By default
this will be you, but you can choose another user. Each owner
can only have one alert type of the same name. Click the Next
button when you are ready to go on.
The last screen you encounter when creating a new Alert Type
is also the screen you use to edit existing Alert Types.
Here you can set rules, edit the alert contents, and designate
the alert recipients.
- Properties
- The first three properties were discussed above. The
Active property determines whether the alert will actually
be sent when the corresponding event occurs. By default,
the alert is active, but you can uncheck the checkbox to
make it inactive.
- Rules
- Rules must be determined to be true for an event in order
for it to trigger an alert. A rule compares data related
to the event (the "attribute") to a value that you enter.
(One thing to note here is that "Trig" is short for
"Triggerer", that is the user who triggered the event.)
Comparisons are case-insensitive (it doesn't matter if you
enter upper or lower case letters) and use one of a number
of operators to compare the value:
- =
- Equal. This will probably be the most-frequently used operator.
It is true if the value exactly matches the event data.
- <>
- Not equal. It is true if the value does not exactly
match the event data.
- >
- Greater than.
- <
- Less than.
- >=
- Greater than or equal.
- <=
- Less than or equal.
- =~
- Match against a Perl regular expression. Explaining regular
expressions is outside the scope of this documentation, but
here are a few examples:
- Partially match a value
- Whereas using "=" above matches the value exactly, if you
enter something here it will match anywhere within the string.
For example, a value of
Spain
would match "Barcelona, Spain".
- Match one of several values
- You can separate several values by '|', and this will match
any of those values. For example,
Spain|France|England
would match any of those three countries. Note that to require
that all of those values match, you would use three separate
"=" rules.
- A fuzzy value
- Say you wanted to match
either "Paris, France" or "Paratroopers in France". You could
use this value:
Par.*France
. The '.' means any character, and
following it by a '*' means to match any number of characters.
- !~
- Don't match a Perl regular expression. This is the opposite of "=~".
- Content
- This is the content that will be sent in the alert. The subject will
be the subject of the email, and the message is the body of the email.
You can enter whatever you want into the text fields, but by using the
select menus you can add event-specific information. There is a menu
for each field, and they are provided for convenience in inserting
"variables" into the fields. Whenever you select an item from the
menu, it automatically goes into the field. The values in the menu
correspond to the "attributes" in the Rules section above. You don't
even have to use the menus; you can just enter the variable directly
into the field. Note that dollar signs (
$
) are special because they
indicate variables, so to include a literal dollar sign you have to
precede it with a backslash, like Cost: \$500
.
- Recipients
- Recipients are those users who will receive this alert.
There are three types of "contact" that can be sent emails:
Primary Email, Secondary Email, and Pager Email. Note especially
that you set these values in the User Profile, where user accounts
are edited. If you select a recipient to receive an event, but the
user doesn't have the contact information entered in their User Profile,
they won't receive the event. Users with multiple addresses will
be sent alerts to each of those addresses.
When you are done, click the Save button at the bottom, or Cancel
to discard your changes. To delete the Alert Type, check the
"Delete this Profile" button and click Save.
For more information on Alerts,
see Bric::Alert.