Creating a ticket pdf from Custom fields in HaloPSA

hi everyone christim here from sindel Consulting in this video I'm going to talk about how we can get uh information out of a ticket so custom fields from a ticket within Halo put them into a PDF document and have that PDF document sent to our customers so let's say we may have a scenario where you you need to do some kind of onboarding for your customer so maybe you know you want to send them all of their onboarding details so I'm going to show you what I've set up um and then what we'll do is we'll go through and kind of create all of this together so the first thing we want to do just uh to take a look at how this works is if we click on the new tickets and I'm just going to select a company in this point and then the ticket type I'm going to use here is new employee on boarding so what I have in here is a whole bunch of different information so I got the higher date so let's just put this in let's put our full name name in here um you know whatever it is if I can spell it correctly you know this is going to [Music] be and the login name is going to be this and let's say your temporary password is um so we're going to call a squeak and maybe your direct report is going to be Pluto okay Department um the mouse department and your HR manager is okay so we're putting all our information in now we've got a notes field in here where we could say you know please ensure you change your password okay and maybe we could also stick some kind of picture in here um and because this is a rich picture you know or Rich text we probably shove a picture in there I'm just going to put one out on the scan better not don't know what that scan is anyway never mind we won't put the picture in but what we can do in here is um now we can see the information on um on here you know please ensure you change your password this is your HR manager so all of this information is basically now entered against the tickets so what we can do up here is we can send the onboarding to the customer so what we're going to do is we're going to say send the onboarding now the first thing you'll note that we've actually done is we've used the the um New person's email address uh and then from here we can put some more notes in here if you want to but here is the PDF that gets generated so if we actually open this PDF document up now you can see a bunch of stuff in here oh um oh so this particular one doesn't put the notes in there um but but when on the one we do together will have the notes but here you can see all of this information and there's there's the information that gets sent to them so I can of course send this to this person it is going to fail and it will just send them this document let's click on send and away it goes let's hope there's no Mickey of mouse.com and there you go so basically they will now get this ticket and um everything will be good okay so let's go and take a look at how we actually did this so to start with what you probably want to start by doing is getting yourself a um you know an HTML document of some kind I will put a a link to my documentation system um below where you can grab this HTML if you want it um it's just some HTML I put together and I use a I use something called HTML instant just gives you a really good way of being able to see um you know see a side by side view so here's our HTML code so what we've got in here is you know the employee onboarding and whatever we fill into our first name field or our full name field in here is going to say you know this is for Mickey Mouse whatever the case might be the higher dates and all of this kind of information plus our notes so what we actually want to do at this point is we want to start by creating a PDF document inhaler so if we simply click on the copy button in here and then if we go into config bottom left corner um and then from here if we just type documents um and I'm just going to get rid of this document actually oh okay it probably won't let me get rid of it um what we would do um is we would create a new one and we would call this let's actually just do this let's call this on boarding YouTube test okay and then under the pages in here um what I would do is take out this page that they've got this html text and simply quite a big document and simply paste our HTML code over the top that we copied from our HTML editor here so if we generated this PDF now you would be able to see by just looking at this here's the information that we have add now you can see it's pretty much put the information correctly onto this document okay well let's go and do this for real now and how would we actually set this up so here's our document we good to go so what we want to do is we want to come into tickets and then ticket types and from here we want to create a new ticket type so let's call this um let's just call this one uh yeah YouTube employee on boarding okay and what we want in here of course um we want an initial status um we also wanted to start a workflow which we'll come back to it a little bit later it's go to the first line support team um and then what we want to do and they've actually changed this where there's um you used to be able to scroll all the way down and find the settings on the bottom but they've now added a new tab called settings um but effectively if we come all the way down kind of near the end of this uh somewhere down here there you go uh PDF prints so it's asking us what document we actually want to use so in this case we're going to use the onboarding YouTube test document for this particular type of ticket now what we're then going to do is we're going to come back into here and we're going to click on our field list and we're going to start adding some Fields uh that we had inside here so what I would basically do is just copy all of these um I'm actually going to bring this out to a a different place just so I can see uh you know how how they set up but I'll show you step by step kind of what we're doing on here so I got to bounce back by the way um so if we come into here and we go into add um now we can obviously select any field in here that we like but what I'm doing is these are all custom fields that I'm using so at this point we're going to Simply click the add button over here Oops why is it not let there go add button and then we're simply going to say you know this is going to be and let's just start this higher date the field label is going to be higher date and the type of field in here is obviously a date field and we click on date uh you know why it's because [Music] we I'll tell you what hang on what I'm going to do is because I already have those custom Fields set up what I'll do is let me um let me show you how we would do this normally um so yeah on our ticket type we just go back to just go back to YouTube on boarding what you what you would essentially be doing um and because I don't want to have to change our HTML document um because it's already kind of pre-filled in with with those custom Fields but effectively all you would do is you'd come in here and you would say you know higher dat one for example and then call this higher date and this higher date one here would basically be the same information um as you have on that document that I showed you but what I'm going to do in the for the purposes of this is I'm actually going to just click on the add button and because I've already got them all um I can just simply select them from here so here we have CF High date which we're going to add we've also got um CF full name we've also got CF email so that one we've got CF login CF login we've also got a CF temp password uh and we've also got a field called CF direct report uh CF direct report and then we've got maybe CF Department sa department and maybe the HR manager so fhr manager and CF note notes yep CF notes and um and I think that's it so what you'll basically see happen at this point when I click on Save we now have all of these fields that have currently been added now it's it's important to note at this point that these fields are called um are prefixed is CF so we need to make sure that we are using the custom field if for example you went into um and let's just duplicate this tab because this is quite important to show you if for example you went into one of these custom fields and we changed let's go into higher date and we change the uh was it in here maybe it's not on the date field let's just try something else uh oh yeah field summary this is what I was looking for so if we put in here field summary and you have something put in here like full name for example what you will actually see happen when we look at this on our um on our ticket type so if we go back to our ticket type and just do a quick Refresh on this what you'll actually see oh and we didn't save it great let's just quickly add them all again CF High date sorry guys um CF full name this is one of the issues with not saving stuff my fault uh CF full name now um yeah I might not do it on this one seef email CF login okay uh let's do CF temp password CF direct report CF department and HR manager cfhr manager if I can type and CF notes save save save okay now we've saved them all um so what you might see if you change that uh that description that inside here instead of it saying first name it would actually have said you know full name or first name actually it's because it's the wrong field that's why and this is your problem it's now you can see it's not actually pulling it um because it's got something different it's now got the word full name now if I'd added this in here what you will see is this will actually show full name in the parentheses instead of showing the CF this will fail on the report okay so what we basically have to do at this point you have to come back into here um and if we go into custom fields and we look for the custom fields for full name what I would normally do at this point so I would simply take off the field summary so that when you look at that field back on the form if we can back into add and now we can say CF full name and you can see it's gone back to the um the custom field and it's this name here that we need in the brackets not the not that kind of description to you know in order for this report to work so just bear that in mind okay so here we have all of our um our fields on here um and we've also linked this using the settings tab we've linked this to tell us what what report we actually want to generate from this okay so now that we have that done that's great the next thing we want to do we want to come in here and we want to add a ticket action so the action on this would be you know let's say YT send uh onboarding let's do this and then I'll just keep this as sequence one and in here the button name let's just say um and of course at this point we're going to pick a button icon you can put whatever you want I think there is a PDF one so we'll just use that one um and then all we need to do is we need to come down here so we've got no system use on this but what we do have is there's a couple of things we want to do um at this point so what we want to do here is we want to say when this action is performed we want to attach a PDF report and the PDF report we want to attach is the onboarding YouTube test okay now the other thing we want to do within this action because we don't just want to have the document printed out we might want to be able to actually send the document to somebody we want to make sure that we have send an email equals yes um and then one of the things we have to come down here um and we can go ahead and actually um use these fields now there's something to note in here so for example um when you first create this the person that you're actually sending this document to who's the the person who's being onboarded probably isn't going to be um uh you know an end user on your system so you're probably not going to log the ticket for them but you may still want to actually send them the email so what you want to do at this point instead of you know this is normally pre-filled in by whoever the um you know contact on the ticket or the the end user what have you um but what we actually want to do we can use use the dollar variables in here so if we called this CF email this basically means it's going to pull the email address from whatever we type in on that document so if we go back to our document it's going to pull in whatever email address we type in here and it's going to allow us to actually use that document to send um to send information to to that person okay and we're going to hit save so technically now we kind of have something all fully working now you could just go ahead and you could you could send this out this AC would appear on on the ticket but one of the things that we really want to do at this point and there is going to be some more videos and I know we've made some with with Morgan before around kind of what ticket workflows are and how ticket workflows work um so I'm just going to build a very quick workflow because I think it's um in fact we've got the onboarding workflow but I'll just go through kind of how this works actually no let me let me start again so let's call this workflow onboarding so maybe we'll just keep this as step one it doesn't really matter the actions that we want in here are going to be we want the action to say send the onboarding doc we also probably want to have you know maybe a private note and we probably also want to have a you know an email user or something to that effect so what we'll effectively do is we'll bring these in and on all of these ones here we can say once you've done this you actually probably just want to move to step two because you know step two is going to just allow us to actually complete the ticket so come through here actually no yeah no I'll keep it on those what we're then going to do is in step two two we're going to come in here and we're going to say the actions that we want in here is maybe going to be um you know do we have a reopen uh maybe we don't oh sorry allow actions let's reopen the first ticket so basically what this means is you know we going to have the ability to close the ticket um so we should probably add that actually at the step before let's come in here and let's say add actions resolve tickets so we could basically have a step that would just go ahead and and resolve this ticket um whatever the case might be so let's just go in here and save this and it's save oops then in here we'll call this YT workflow all right so now we have everything we need in place last thing we need to do is go back into our ticket type we need to go to our YT onboarding and we need to tell this onboarding document in here to start a workflow so the workflow we're going to start is the YT workflow and that's it so what we can now do is if we click on add a new ticket and let's pick a customer name and the ticket type we're going to use here is going to be YT employee on boarding so we're going to pick what their higher date is um we're also going to pick the email address whatever the case might be login name temporary password is and the direct report is going to be and then he's in the uh water department HR manager is Pluto and in here we can say um please change the password and of course here the full name is going to be now of course we can have this form kind of um you know these things being in in in different orders I just made a very simple form you can customize this and make it look pretty but effectively what we're going to do is we're going to hit submit so now we filled in all of the details um which you'll actually see all those details eventually they don't seem to show up in there but what we do have now is the ability to send this document so let's send this um this onboarding document so if we simply click in here you can see by clicking on the action we're now sending this email to Donald ATD duck.com and we have our PDF document um that's been created and if I open up this PDF document with a bit of luck we should see that this is the employee onboarding for Donald Duck some of their information there's the password blah blah blah please change your password etc etc so our document has worked we've basically had all of this information in here and now we can just go ahead and simply send this to them um or of course you know you can choose not to send it if you if you wanted to if you didn't want to have an email in here and just print it out um you could you could do that um in this case I'm actually going to send it to my Gmail account um feel free to spam me on that if you want to it's it's unmonitored um but yeah so what I can now do is um if I simply click the send button I will now get an email inside my Gmail account with that document now you you may say well what's the point of sending the person the document if they don't have the details of course um you know because how are you going to know how to log into your computer to get your email if you Haven an actually already um you know already had this document to log in so what I would do is print it out and maybe when you supply their PC kind of put it on top but also have it in the email so that they they have it for whenever they need it and there it is there's the document ready to go and of course because in our workflow um we added this as the last step we now have the ability to kind of come in here and reopen the ticket so for you know if for whatever reason we have to reopen this kind of ticket we simply have got the reopen ticket button here and this is going to allow us to reopen the tickets so I really hope that uh this was useful if you like these kinds of videos um then you know please give it a like and sub subscribe uh it really does help please give me a thumbs up and uh I'll be making some more of these and I look forward to seeing you guys on the next video thank you very much and have a great day