Inbound Email Action - Create Incident: Email Incident being created without short description

[CJPeterson]

Hi All, 

I found some incidents are being created without short description since user is not using subject line in email although short description is a mandatory field to create an incident.  Could someone advise me where to look for the logic behind incident still being created with no short description. 

I found Inbound Action Email - Create Incident: 

* This inbound email action is triggered when an email is sent to ServiceNow, and the email is not a reply or forward.

This inbound email action can set the following fields on a new Incident:

assigned_to
priority

In addition to being able to explicitly set the values of the above fields within the email, the following is done automatically:

1. The Incident caller_id is set to the the user who sent the email.
2. The email subject is set as the Incident short description.
3. The whole email is added to the Incident as a comment.
4. The Incident category is set to "inquiry".
5. The Incident state is set to "1".
6. The Incident notify is set to "2".
7. The Incident contact type is set to "email". * 

Also, is there a way to avoid incident being created if the user did not provide a subject line in the email. Scripting is new to me so it's taking me some time to understand the BRs. 

Thanks, in advance!

[Brian Lancaster · Accepted solution]

Since it is a script creating the incident that is why it can be created without a short description even though it is mandatory. What you could do is update the code to check if the email subject is null then set the short_description to the email body_text. This will just truncate what does not fit in the subject. Similar to the way the out of the box created incident record producer works.

On another note at most places I have worked we disabled email creation of incidents to force people to use the system.

[CJPeterson]

Thank you for explaining this! This was very helpful