“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”
— General George S. Patton
Well, it’s not the way that I like to do things, but it does work, so there is at least that. If I can ever stumble across a way to do it right, I will. For now, though, this will have to do. I never could find a modifiable source for either the pop-up e-mail form or the drop-down menu, so I eventually gave up on trying to send the right content for the page to the browser from the start. My fallback plan was to modify the page after it was rendered on the browser to achieve my desired results. That’s not really the way that I like to do things, but hey — It works!
I inspected the Email option of the drop-down menu and determined that it had an ID of email_client_open. Armed with that useful tidbit of information, I was able to create the following Client Script linked to the Incident table:
function onLoad() {
var elem = gel('email_client_open');
if (elem) {
elem.onclick = function() {
var dialog = new GlideDialogWindow('email_recipient_selector');
dialog.setSize(400,400);
dialog.setTitle('Select Recipient');
dialog.render();
};
}
}
All in all, it took four independent components to pull this off: 1) the Client Script (above), 2) the UI Page that served as the content of the modal dialog, 3) a UI Script to run on the original Email Client pop-up to pull in the selections passed in the URL, and 4) a Script Include to go get the appropriate email addresses based on the user’s selections on the modal dialog. Now, when you click on the Email menu option, a new interim modal dialog pops up asking you to select the recipients of the email:
The UI Page is the most straightforward component of the lot. It’s just a standard page using standard approaches to collect information from the user and pass it along to the other elements in the chain. Here is the HTML in its entirety:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<j:jelly trim="false" xmlns:j="jelly:core" xmlns:g="glide" xmlns:j2="null" xmlns:g2="null">
<div style="padding: 20px;">
Please select the recipients to whom you would like to send e-mail from the list below:
<input type="checkbox" style="margin: 0px 8px 5px 30px;" id="caller"/>Caller
<input type="checkbox" style="margin: 0px 8px 5px 30px;" id="group"/>Assignment Group
<input type="checkbox" style="margin: 0px 8px 5px 30px;" id="tech"/>Assigned Technician
<button class="button" onclick="composeEmail();">Compose E-mail</button>
</div>
</j:jelly>
And here is the associated script:
function composeEmail() {
var caller = gel('caller').checked;
var group = gel('group').checked;
var tech = gel('tech').checked;
if (caller || group || tech) {
continueToOriginalEmailPopUp(caller, group, tech);
} else {
alert('You must select at least one recipient to send an e-mail');
}
}
function continueToOriginalEmailPopUp(caller, group, tech) {
var id = g_form.getUniqueValue();
if (id) {
var url = new GlideURL("email_client.do");
url.addParam("sysparm_table", 'incident');
url.addParam("sysparm_sys_id", id);
url.addParam("sysparm_target", 'incident');
if (caller) {
url.addParam("sysparm_to_caller", "true");
}
if (group) {
url.addParam("sysparm_to_group", "true");
}
if (tech) {
url.addParam("sysparm_to_tech", "true");
}
popupOpenEmailClient(url.getURL() + g_form.serializeChangedAll());
GlideDialogWindow.get().destroy();
}
}
To read the new parameters added to the URL when the email client page comes up, I needed to attach a script to that page. Here again, the problem is that I have been unable to find any way to modify that page directly. I’m not too proud of the solution that I came up with to address this problem, but again, it does work. To make it happen, I created a global UI Script that will now be included on every single page on this instance, but will look at the current location to see if needs to do anything. If the current page is not the email client pop-up, then it does nothing, but it still has to ask, which is a virtually pointless exercise on any page other than the one that I want. Still, it’s a way to get something to run on that page, and that’s what I was after. Here is the code:
if (window.location.pathname == '/email_client.do') {
setupRecipients();
}
function setupRecipients() {
var qp = {};
var qs = window.location.search.substring(1);
var parts = qs.split('&');
for (var i=0; i<parts.length; i++) {
var temp = parts[i].split('=');
qp[temp[0]] = decodeURIComponent(temp[1]);
}
if (qp['sysparm_table'] == 'incident') {
var caller = qp['sysparm_to_caller'];
var group = qp['sysparm_to_group'];
var tech = qp['sysparm_to_tech'];
var ga = new GlideAjax('EmailRecipientTool');
ga.addParam('sysparm_name', 'getRecipients');
ga.addParam('sysparm_sys_id', qp['sysparm_sys_id']);
ga.addParam('sysparm_to_caller', caller);
ga.addParam('sysparm_to_group', group);
ga.addParam('sysparm_to_tech', tech);
ga.getXML(function(response) {
var string = response.responseXML.documentElement.getAttribute("answer");
var recipient = JSON.parse(string);
var spans = $(document.body).select(".address");
for (var i=0; i<spans.length; i++) {
spans[i].className = 'addressHighlight';
}
deleteHighlightedAddresses();
for (var i=0; i<recipient.length; i++) {
var input = {};
input.value = recipient[i].email;
addEmailAddressToList('MsgToUI', input);
}
});
}
}
To fetch the requested recipient e-mail addresses from the system database, the above script makes an Ajax call to the last component in the solution, the Script Include developed for this purpose:
var EmailRecipientTool = Class.create();
EmailRecipientTool.prototype = Object.extendsObject(AbstractAjaxProcessor, {
getRecipients: function() {
var list = [];
var gr = new GlideRecord('incident');
gr.get(this.getParameter('sysparm_sys_id'));
if (this.getParameter('sysparm_to_caller') == 'true') {
this.addRecipient(list, {sys_id: gr.getDisplayValue('caller_id.sys_id'), name: gr.getDisplayValue('caller_id.name'), email: gr.getDisplayValue('caller_id.email')});
}
if (this.getParameter('sysparm_to_group') == 'true') {
this.addGroup(list, gr.getValue('assignment_group'));
}
if (this.getParameter('sysparm_to_tech') == 'true') {
this.addRecipient(list, {sys_id: gr.getDisplayValue('assigned_to.sys_id'), name: gr.getDisplayValue('assigned_to.name'), email: gr.getDisplayValue('assigned_to.email')});
}
return JSON.stringify(list);
},
addGroup: function(list, group) {
if (group > '') {
var gr = new GlideRecord('sys_user_grmember');
gr.addQuery('group', group);
gr.query();
while (gr.next()) {
this.addRecipient(list, {sys_id: gr.getDisplayValue('user.sys_id'), name: gr.getDisplayValue('user.name'), email: gr.getDisplayValue('user.email')});
}
}
},
addRecipient: function(list, recipient) {
if (recipient.sys_id > '') {
var duplicate = false;
for (var i=0; i<list.length; i++) {
if (recipient.sys_id == list[i].sys_id) {
duplicate = true;
}
}
if (!duplicate) {
list.push(recipient);
}
}
},
type: 'EmailRecipientTool'
});
Well, that’s it. If anyone is interested, I bundled all four parts into an Update Set, which you can grab here. I was able to do that, by the way, thanks to this tool, which I cannot recommend highly enough. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve used that since I first installed it. The folks that put that together and keep it maintained do very nice work indeed, and have both my admiration and my appreciation.
