Abstract
Now that we have our tickets in the SharePoint list, we can significantly improve the productivity of our help desk technicians by letting them manage tickets on their mobile devices (as well as their computer if desired). We will let PowerApps build the basic plumbing of the form and then customize from there.
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Notes
- 1.
Notice how we use an OR condition (||) and IsBlank() to account for the fact that there won’t be a technician assigned at first. Without this, only tickets with an assigned technician were displayed (and we couldn’t then see the tickets to assign someone).
- 2.
I was making other edits to the form and couldn’t get any of the new tickets I created for testing to show up. I eventually figured out that only the first 500 records were showing up (e.g., all our resolved and currently being worked tickets).
- 3.
A SharePoint 2013 workflow worked better than Flow in this case as Flow wanted to update all the columns (particularly the mandatory ones).
- 4.
We could have used the Rich text editor control as well and in fact that works better when it comes time to edit the Description.
- 5.
I didn’t notice the problem with the default combo box control when testing on a computer. However, when I published a version to the help desk and a technician tested on his iPad, each combo box displayed the iPad’s virtual keyboard and that got in the way of filling in the form. Switching to drop-down boxes fixed that problem.
- 6.
We don’t just want to send an email whenever the status is Resolved since the user could get duplicate emails such as in the situation where a technician edits a ticket to add additional notes. Instead, we only want to send the email the one time the status is changed to Resolved.
- 7.
We could do this in the OnSelect event for the save button (IconAccept1 control), but we then have a problem if there is an error. The filter would have changed and now our form would potentially disappear. Instead, we wait until we know our changes were successful.
- 8.
We will limit to Office 365 users since otherwise we don’t have a way to prevent one person from looking up someone else’s tickets. Plus, there is no way to launch a PowerApps application unless you have an Office 365 account and it is shared with you. We got by that with our kiosk application for creating a ticket, but there would be security problems with a kiosk to view tickets.
- 9.
Note that this solution will run into problems if the user ever exceeds 500 tickets. But that is much better than a limit of 500 tickets total.
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© 2019 Jeffrey M. Rhodes
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Rhodes, J.M. (2019). Continuing the Help Ticketing System: Technician Form. In: Creating Business Applications with Office 365. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5331-1_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5331-1_16
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