KPI Monitoring: Utilities
Utilities
External Message Editing
KPI Monitoring includes a way to enable users to edit and modify an event’s alert message content without accessing the KPI Monitoring application. This function is referred to as “External Message Editing”.
Instead of storing an event’s alert message content within the “Email”, “Text” or “Webcast” tabs of an event, you may store the event’s message content within a field of a database table. After you do this, you, go into an event’s “Email”, “Text” or “Webcast” tabs, and refer to the name of the database field that contains the message content.
When the corresponding event is triggered, KPI Monitoring will notice that the contents of the alert message refers to a database field name. And, when KPI Monitoring goes to translate that field, it will see that this field’s contents consist not of hard-coded text, but rather a combination of hard-coded text and other database field variables. KPI Monitoring will then translate those contents into the corresponding alert message text.
Create External Message Table
To use External Message Editing, you first need to create a table that will house the editable message format. It does not matter what this table is called, or where it is stored, but it is suggested that if a client is using KPI Monitoring to monitor an application called “Target” that you create a new table in the “Target” database and call that table something like “KS Message”. (You may use multiple tables that contain editable message formats for events.)
Create Field(s) for Message Formats
Since the new table will store the editable message format for an event, you need to create one or more data fields (columns) within the table that are going to hold the message content.
For example, if you wish to allow users to externally edit the email message text for a KPI Monitoring event, you might wish to create a field called something like “Email_Data” in the table you have created.
The columns that will hold the message formatting instructions must be “character” or “memo” type and must be capable of storing a large amount of alphanumeric data.
Create Access for Editing the Table
The next step is to identify the means by which users will edit and/or customize the contents of the table created in the previous steps.
The method by which you allow users to edit this content is up to you; if you wish to allow non-technical users to perform External Message Editing, it is suggested that you create a friendly user interface that allows users to easily do this.
If, on the other hand, only programmers are going to be editing KPI Monitoring’s messages externally, you can let programmers use any number of database access tools to edit the table’s contents.
What Should the Table’s Contents Look Like?
Consider the scenario where you’ve created a table called “KS Message” and you have a field within it called “Email_Data”.
The contents of the “Email_Data” field would be the same as the contents of the “Email” tab for an event. For example, if you wished to create a message that sends a “thank you for ordering” message, the contents of the “Email_Data” field might look like the following:
Hello, {FIRSTNAME}:
Thank you very much for doing business with Acme Corporation. We have processed the following order for you:
Description: {DESCRIPTION}
Order Amount: {ACTUALAMOUNT}
Should you have any questions about this order, please feel free to contact your salesperson, {ACCT_MGR} via phone at 800-850-8055, or via electronic mail at {ACCT_MGR_EMAIL}.
Thank you again for doing business with us.
Acme Corporation
902 Hines Point
Vineyard Haven, MA 02568
Note the following about the contents of this column:
- Any of the database fields referred to in this column must also exist within the trigger that is used by the corresponding event.
- You may include both hard-coded text and database field values
- You may include date substitution variables
- You may include {BEGIN*REPEAT} and {END*REPEAT}.
- You may include {BEGIN*HTML} and {END*HTML}.
- You may include any of KPI Monitoring’s field formatting commands.
Modify Trigger (Query) to Retrieve External Data
To configure an event to send an alert using data defined within an external table, you must ensure that the event’s trigger retrieves not only all the necessary message data that is referenced within the external table, but that it retrieves data from the external table as well. Follow these steps (which use a query to retrieve database fields):
Open the event’s query, go to the “Columns” tab, and add the table that contains the external message data. (You do not need to link the external message data table to the existing table for the query.) Still on the “Columns” tab, add the column from the external message data table that contains the alert message text.
If your external message data table contains more than one record (e.g., if it contains multiple alert message formats), you must include filtering in your query to ensure that only a single record from that table is selected. Query “Preview” mode will display the actual contents of the selected column; it will not show you the translated values of the database field values that are referenced within that external message table field.
Edit the Event to Reference the External Data
The final step in configuring an event to retrieve message data from the external table is to modify the event to refer to the data field in the external data table. Follow these steps:
- Open the Event you wish to use the external message data.
- Go to the appropriate message deliverable tab (i.e., “Email”).
- In the “Message Body”, go to the list of “Available Values for Use in Message Content” and select the field containing the external message data.
Note: that an event may refer to multiple external data fields in its alert configuration. For example, your email message body could appear as follows:
{EMAIL_INTRO}
{EMAIL_BODY}
{EMAIL_CLOSING