In many issues of "KnowledgeSync News", we like to focus on a single technical aspect of the application that warrants a little extra explanation. This issue, the subject will be:

"Specifying a Break Field for an Alert"

It doesn't take long for most KnowledgeSync partners - and clients - to discover the {BEGIN*REPEAT} and {END*REPEAT} option when designing an alert message. There are many KnowledgeSync clients who use this option to create single alert messages that list overdue invoices, opportunities that are due to close, and inventory items that are approaching their re-order level.

But there are still many - many - KnowledgeSync partners and clients who assume that their choice is limited to -one or all- - that is, they can either configure KnowledgeSync to generate one alert message for each record that meets an event's criteria, or they can generate one alert message that lists ALL the records that meet an event's criteria.

The truth is - and a little-known but very valuable truth it is - that KnowledgeSync alert messages can be configured to "break" or "group" records together in whatever order you wish. Consider the examples mentioned above, but with the following breaking/grouping:

• A separate alert message (for each account manager) that lists overdue invoices for their clients

• A separate alert message (for each region) that lists all opportunities due to close

• A separate alert message (for each warehouse) that lists inventory items approaching their re-order level

Because breaking/grouping is often based on the recipient of an alert (such as the first example above), you need to look at the "Subscribers" tab of an event for control of the breaking/grouping logic.

If an event uses "Advanced Subscribers" (e.g., in example #1, you want KnowledgeSync to send an alert to the account manager who has clients with overdue invoices), KnowledgeSync will automatically break to a new message if an event uses {BEGIN*REPEAT} and {END*REPEAT} and has a value in one of the fields in the lower Advanced Subscriber grid.

(Thus if you used the lower grid to contain the email address of the account manager, KnowledgeSync would automatically send each account manager a list of only his/her clients with overdue invoices.)

If an event is not breaking based on the recipient of an alert (such as examples #2 and #3 above), the first field in the top grid in the Advanced Subscribers tab is used to specify the break/group field.

Thus in scenario #2, this field would contain the "region" field, and in scenario #3, this field would contain the "warehouse" field.

In all of these scenarios, there is one more step you must be sure to take. In the underlying query for each of these events, you must be sure to "sort" the query's results by the field you wish to break/sort on. That way, the resulting record set of each query will already have the records grouped/sorted in the appropriate order and thus KnowledgeSync can create single alert messages that group the appropriate records together.

If you have any questions about creating alert messages that contain selected groups of records, or any other KnowledgeSync functionality, please contact Don Farber at farber@vineyardsoft.com