I was recently commuting into London when I received a message on LinkedIn. It was a Unified Service Desk question from a student at Madrid University. The question was about opening a related tab when loading a phone call. My answer is here, I hope this helps them …

You might often want to open a regarding entity when starting sessions in USD. Some examples would include;

1. Opening a regarding entity on an activity, such as opening a contact when a phone call opens.

2. Opening the customer associated with a case when we open an incident.

3. Opening the primary contact when an account loads.

In my USD application I commonly do all of these things!

The question I was asked focused on phone call, so I will explain how to achieve this using phone call as my example.

In the question the suggestion was to open the “from” or “to” record. This might work in some circumstances! But we could have multiple entries in these fields which might break the approach.  (Any activity could be “to” multiple people, uncommon with a phone call but technically possible.) Hence why I focus on the reagrdingobectid field instead. As each phone call will always be regarding just one thing! (But if required you could adapt this idea to use the first activity party in the to / from party list.)

Our next challenge is that the regarding object could be an account, lead, contact or almost anything else for that matter. We probably can’t be expected to cope with every combination but handling more than one entity will be common.

Timing will be another challenge. If we trigger an action to load the regarding before the phone call has loaded we’ll get an error. So we’ll need to ensure our action to open the regarding record is fired at the right moment.

Below you can see that in my USD system I have opened an account and phone call. The open of the account record happened automatically because the phone call loaded!

The steps involved are;

1. Create an action to open “any” regarding entity.
2. Create an execute on data available action
3. Add you actions to “correct” window navigation rule.

Step One – Action to open “any” regarding entity

When I say any entity I actual mean, contact, lead or account. But you could do any is you really wanted!

My action is shown below;

Importantly I aslo added this condition;

The details of my action are;

Step Two – Execute on Data Available Action

When I run my Open_CRM_Page action I’ll need to know that the phone call has actually loaded. SO that the required replacement parameters are available to me. My execute on data available action is shown below. Notice that the data field says “[[phonecall.regardingobjectid.type]]”, I picked this field as I was going to use it in my action but to be honest any field from the phonecall entity would have worked!

Having saved your action , navigate to sub actions and add the action we created in step one.

Step Three – Add to Window Navigation Rule

I already had an window navigation rule that was used to create my phone call session. So I simply added the ExeccuteOnDataAvailable action to that. So load your navigation rule, open the actions and add. Simples!

Below you can see mine, in which I have my excute on data available action and other actions I want to run whilst my session starts!

I hope this post has answered the question I was asked. You’ll need to amend to fit your specific scenario but I hope the principle is clear.