If you have created a new primary entity in Sage CRM and would like to have notifications for this table it seems a disappointment that a "Notifications" Tab is not available for the newly created entity.
The Quick Notifications functionality allows you to create notification rules for main entities in CRM. Notification rules can contain up to five conditions. If all or some of the conditions are satisfied, a notification message is sent to the specified user in email format or on-screen.
The Notification functionality is really a simple way of creating Escalation rules. Escalation rules can be used to trigger an action or series of actions based on an SQL WHERE clause.
Notifications and Escalation Rules
- Both expressed using SQL
- Both stored in workflow rules table
- Both fired and controlled by the escalation mechanism
- Both logged in escalations and SQL logs
- Notifications are tied to the use of the Escalations table
Notification rules rely on some behaviour that originates in the dll. To allow Quick Notifications to be simply set up they are based on database views that include reference to the 'Escalation' table. If a Quick Notification rule has been created for a particular primary entity then entries will automatically be created in this table to allow the Quick Notifications to work.
The views that are used for each entity are:
- Cases: vNotificationCases
- Communications: vNotificationCommunication
- Companies: vNoticationCompany
- Leads: vNotificationLead
- Opportunities: vNotificationOpportunity
- Persons: vNotificationPerson
For example if you add a simple Notification on the Communication Entity to have an email sent to everyone invited to a meeting you can use the logs to trace the database actions:
- Insert Communication
- Insert Communication Link
- Insert Escalation record
So can we have simple Notifications on custom entities? The simple answer is no. But we can have escalation rules and we can make use of the Escalation table. To use the escalation table we would have to manage the data in the Escalation table with TableLevel Scripts and build a custom view based on the existing Notification rules as above. For example a PostInsertRecord() event function could be used to insert a record into the Escalation rule and the custom view would allow a new escalation rule to offer the same functionality (and more) as the Quick Notification functionality.