Troubleshooting email notifications - Send to the Event Creator

[iris_geist]

"Beware, Beware of the Event Creator," one of our experienced Implementers rfedoruk wrote in a Tweet last week. I have to agree with him 100%.

Looking back to when I started working at ServiceNow, when you wanted to send an email notifying a user of changes to their tasks, you would need an event defined in the event registry, a business rule entry creating the event queue record, and a notification that fired when the event was processed. You could pass the recipient in the event parameters (or any other information for that matter, but usually it was the recipient), and there was this checkbox, "send to event creator," that made sure that if you were the user who updated the record, you would not get an email on top of your own personal action.

Unfortunately, when you are testing an email notification you don't want the email with your test information to go out to "real" users, so we test by sending the email to ourselves. Then we wonder why the notification we so painstakingly created based on all the requirements we were given does not work…

I can't even count how many times we spend hours troubleshooting a seemingly fine notification, and finally the light bulb — who is updating the record, who is the recipient, what is the value of that tricky checkbox?

Talking to Robert, we found another angle to this issue — if the recipient is not a user, but an email address (such as me@mail.com), the event creator is compared to any user that has that email address — and if they match, the notification will not fire.

A lot has changed since those good ol' days, though. Now, you can still send notifications via events — as described above — but also via the notification engine that is run every time a record is inserted or updated. The notification engine determines if the email should be sent or not by the condition as well as the inserted/updated checkboxes.

But will it send an email to the event creator, or do we have to worry about the checkbox there, too?

I tested this in my Eureka instance, and yes, even though the notification is not sent based on the event, if you want to be the recipient of an email upon an action you performed (e.g. insert or update of an incident), you must mark the checkbox that says "send to event creator"!

So I can wholeheartedly agree — beware, beware the event creator. It may, in fact, be the cause of many hours of troubleshooting your email notifications. But the good news is, in production environments, we usually do not have the issue, since we really do not want to send an email upon an action you just did yourself. Just during testing, when we do the work by ourselves — creating the record, updating the record, receiving the email — that is when the event creator catches us unaware…