Is it possible to change an activity field by a rule action?

Unfortunately no. The rule engine can’t update or create a timeline activity. Only the creator of the activity can update it. There is a product idea for this, please come help vote it up.

• Creating timeline activity via rules? Open
• 125 Votes

@Lisa-new user  - the best solution here might be to run the zendesk rule once a day and in your fetch task, choose only those activities that were created with a date = yesterday. This will ensure that all activities are considered and no activities are evaluated twice. 

Hi @Lisa-new user 

Yes, in your rule create a filter using the Date field. Like @dan_ahrens mentioned.

“Activity Created date = Subtract N days from Rule Date with a value 1”. 

Hi all, 

thank you for the super quick responses.

Unfortunately update once a day is not enough. We need the ticket creation to run nearly real-time, that’s why the daily-settings are not sufficient for our use case.

The plan was to run several copies of the rule (just rule could run every 2 hours at least).

If you have any other ideas I would be very happy.

Best 

Lisa

Hi @Lisa-new user 

Try this workaround, hope that will work.

First, create one rule that has to fetch all the required fields from the Activity Timeline object in-order to create the Ticket.

And Load that data to an MDA Custom created Object. And Schedule the rule to run every 2 hours.

Second, Create another rule using the above created MDA Object.

This second rule has to be multiple fetches and merge transformations.

Fetch one: from the MDA Object

Fetch two: from the Zendesk Object

Merge: MDA Fetch with Zendesk Fetch with a Left Outer Join.

And create 2 Actions, 1. for creating the Zendesk Ticket, 2. Update a field in MDA Object to know, is the ticket created or not(Yes or No) or (True or False).

And schedule this to run every 2 hours.

Thanks.

Yes, this approach also was good and will works.