I've uncovered some tricky behavior in Rules Engine.

My use case: Fetch Campaign Attendee information from Salesforce and log selected Campaign (Event) participation to the Gainsight Company timeline. Include any attendees who are in Gainsight as External Attendees.

I get the data I need just fine, but when I add the Rule Action to log an individual's attendance to the Company Timeline, Gainsight will only load one record per Company GSID and ignore the rest. This is not the desired behavior.

One issue is that I can’t seem to add more than one External Attendee to a single timeline entry. 

For example, if 3 people from the same company attend the same webinar, only one of them will get logged and the other two records are dropped. I can't figure out a way to organize the data so that all attendees are associated with one Company GSID in a single record.

Another issue is that if we have one Company attend multiple events in one rule run, only one of those events will be added to the Timeline. Any subsequent events are dropped (not actioned) and don’t appear on the Timeline. 

Here’s a screenshot of a manual test run showing the number of records that match the criteria and then get dropped.

How can I achieve my objective?

I am trying to dynamically link SFDC Opportunities to Renewal CTAs when created by Rules Engine / Journey Orchestrator.  I have the linking setup, but it doesn’t let me specify “Opportunity ID” as the identifier.  When I try to use the unique Opportunity ID to link the objects via rule, it does not work.  Once the CTA is created I can do a lookup to the name of the Opportunity.   Is it not possible to set the link via rule for an item in an SFDC Object?  Will have a test scenario ready for the call.

Hi @travis_floyd -- I have the ask out to Engineering/Product, but between many of our PMs traveling home from the US post-pulse and an off day in India as well as US for Gainsight tomorrow, I may not have an answer for you before Office Hours today -- HOWEVER, if you have an example set up, we can give it a try.

What I’ve asked internally, and hoping that it can be done, is to run this via an API call, which requires that you specify the Data Store being used (our example calls always show “MDA” as the data store) -- I’ve crossed my figures hoping that by changing the data store name and pointing your ID to a different field in Cockpit Associated Objects, we can trigger the SFDC-sourced link -- but need confirmation on that one.

In the meantime, we can give the test case a try when you are on the session later!

@sdrostgainsightcom - CRAZY ENOUGH… I was building out my test today in HRE to demo the issue… and it WORKED!  I also validated it from the JO Program that I want to use this with and that worked TOO!   Guess you are off the hook! 

WOOOOO HOOOOO!  I’ll withdraw the question (actually, still interested in whether it can be done with an api call, so I’ll leave it out there) but glad to hear it worked!

By any chance, when you were testing it before, were you logged directly into GS? Or via SFDC? and different this time?  (just thinking it might require you to be logged in via Hybrid when manually running the rule in case we authenticate that rule run as the admin user or something).

Anyway, glad it worked @travis_floyd -- enjoy the weekend and I’m sure we’ll talk next week!

I am always logged in via SFDC.

Hello @alyssa.harding  -- was a quiet session today (just one other question) and didn’t see you join the bridge yet so I dropped off for the moment - if you jump on in the next 40 minutes or so, though, I will get an email notification that you joined and can jump back on myself.

Otherwise, look to join next Tuesday or Thursday so we can dig into the use case a little more, since the answer/options for this are actually more complex than just that Rules Engine “Load to Activities” challenge you are tripping over.

Although I can’t dig into all the details (I’d be typing for ever), the short version is this:

• Load to Activities currently allows you to ONLY load “Milestone” activities, and although I’m guessing you’ve added the External Attendees field to your Milestone Timeline layout, there are some nuances specific to Milestones that may get in your way.
• You will probably have to load these via API -- using External Actions with the Rules Engine -- I can talk through it a bit on a session next week if you can join.
• Even going the API route to get these into Timeline (which DOES allow multiple External Attendees to be entered), those Attendees need to be in a single string separated by commas -- that will be tough to do with Rules Engine because there could be 1 attendee, or there could be 50 attendees.

So - looking forward to talking through the use case a bit if you can jump on the Tuesday or the Thursday session next week and we can go from there -- you might consider using a different custom object for this “Event Attendees”-type information, but let’s discuss which direction will be best.

Have a great long weekend!

Best,

Scott Drost

Gainsight