question Configuring notifications to go to a user in a custom variable in Community Central forum

Configuring notifications to go to a user in a custom variable

KaciW — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:05:35 GMT

Background: we have users who enter incidents but are unreachable - they go on PTO or they are do not work any overlapping hours with the engineer who is troubleshooting the issue, therefore we need another user identified as their [reachable] back-up contact.

Within a variable set on an incident, I have created a question for the user to select an alternate contact; this question references the sys_user table. However, via Notification configuration, I cannot pull that question/field in to include that user as a recipient of the email notifications.

I've looked at other community posts and see that it's somewhat possible with lots of coding but that's not something I'm skilled at yet. Does anyone have any non-coding resolutions to suggest?

Thank you.

Re: Configuring notifications to go to a user in a custom variable

Its_Azar — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:50:49 GMT

Hi there @KaciW

This is expected behavior—catalog/variable set variables are not directly available to Notifications because notifications can only reference fields on the target table (in this case, incident), not variables stored in sc_item_option_mtom. There’s no true no-code way around this. The cleanest approach is to copy the selected backup contact variable into a real Incident field (for example, u_backup_contact) using a Record Producer script, Flow, or Business Rule, and then use that field in the notification’s Users/Groups in fields. That keeps the solution simple, supportable, and avoids complex notification scripts.