Showing number count in the module (Left Navigation Menu)

[ryuzh]

Hello,

I am wondering if it's possible to show the number of count for certain modules on left navigation menu, and refresh the count once a while (i.e. 5 minutes), like below highlighted:

Incident -> Assigned to me (10)

I saw a similar post, but it is not working with U16 and not available anymore.

If there is no solution to add the count to the module name, is it possible to highlight the module name if the count>0?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions

Jack

[Community Alums]

I don't think so. Perhaps use a dashboard to show this upon login.

[Tim Woodruff · Accepted solution]

The short answer is, as @Mark Bennett said, unfortunately no. 

However, this was an interesting question, so - just as a thought experiment, I came up with a potential solution to kind of do what you want, at least in some very specific situations. 
This wouldn't update the title of the actual Application Navigator "module", but instead they use the "Favorites" section of the application navigator, and dynamically update it. 

I may even make this into an actual tool that supports more dynamic and configurable "dynamic favorites definitions" in the near future, if I have some free time. For now, here are the basics of how I'm picturing it: 

(In this example, assume that the dynamic favorite is for "My Incidents", and should show a count of open incidents assigned to the user)

1. Add a true/false (boolean) column to the sys_ui_bookmark table: "Dynamic favorite". 
2. Add a UI Policy and before-change Business Rule that makes it so that if the "dynamic favorite" field is set to true, updates to the bookmark are disallowed for interactive sessions. Or something. That is, I'd think through whether and how you want to "protect" these favorites, and how you want your functionality to behave if a user deletes or changes it (do you recreate it? disallow the change? try to determine which is the correct dynamic favorite, and continue updating it?)
3. Add either a scheduled job that goes through the sys_ui_bookmark table and updates all dynamic favorites pointing to a specific link or with a specific name that you've set, or a business rule that fires on the (in this case, "incident") table whenever a relevant field's value changes. For this example, those fields might be active, state, and assigned_to. 
4. In the scheduled job, you could use a GlideAggregate to get a count of open incidents assigned to each user, and ensure that each such user has one of your dynamic bookmark records in the sys_ui_bookmark table. If they already have that dynamic favorite record, just update the title to contain the new count. 
   If you use a business rule,instead of getting a count for all users, you'd just have to find the dynamic bookmark corresponding to the specific user in the assigned_to field (both previous and current, if it changes), and update only their specific dynamic bookmark records. 

The more robust and configurable solution would obviously be to have some "dynamic favorite definition" record which might specify things like, the URL to point to, the table and fields that it relates to, and some conditions relating to the users who should receive the dynamic bookmarks, and maybe the default order value for the bookmark. But that would be quite an undertaking to write. 
Still, I might write it myself eventually. If I do, I'll come update this post. Until then, the one-off solution above might be sufficient for your use-case. 

[ryuzh]

Thank you so much Tim. This is a brilliant workaround.  

Jack

[SHRAAVYA ANASUR]

Hello Tim,

Is this implemented in the tool yet? Could you please let me know how to configure it if it's implemented?

Thanks in advance!