There may be situations where a case status needs to be transitioned automatically to a final Status based on criteria set by the form builder. We call this an auto-cancellation or auto-closing, depending on the use case. In this article, auto-close refers to both cancellation and closing.
Requirements before Creating Your Rule
To auto-close a case, you need to have a Status, Transition and a Rule.
- You may have a final Status already created that you would like case submissions to automatically transition to after a certain period of time (ex. Cancelled, Closed).
- If you do not have a Status for submissions to auto-transition to, you need to create one.
- You must identify every Status in your workflow that may result in auto-closing - it may be one or two, or it could possibly be all of your initial and normal Statuses, depending on your use case.
- After creating or identifying an auto-close Status for your use case, you need a Transition to move submissions to that final Status (ex. Cancel).
- If you do not have a Transition for submissions to auto-transition with, you need to create one.
Creating a Rule to Auto-Close a Case
Once you have completed all of the requirements in the previous section, determine the criteria for the transition to occur and add them to a Rule.
A common use case for auto-closing is when a case has been inactive for a certain period of time. For example, you may wish to auto-close a case if no action has been taken on a case for 14 days.
- Click the Rules tab.
- Click New Rule.
- Enter a meaningful Name to describe the action that will occur.
- When defines what will trigger the rule. To auto-close a case, a common trigger is Time in Status.
- Select the Status you want to transition from.
- To add more than one status, click Or to create another When row.
- The remaining fields in the row dynamically update to reflect the selected trigger.
- Example: When Time in Status(Submitted)reaches 14 days.
- To add more than one status, click Or to create another When row.
- Then defines a list of actions to perform for each case where the When action has happened.
- Apply Transition: Select the Transition you wish to apply.
- Send an email: You may wish to notify impacted users with an email. Learn more about creating Email Templates.
- Note: Actions execute in the order in which they are defined.
- For example, apply transition, then send an email means that the transition will be applied before an email sends to the user.
- Apply Transition: Select the Transition you wish to apply.
- Click Save.
For more information about rule options, please refer to the vendor documentation about Rules.