question Extracting Name from Incident 'Description' in Incident Management forum

Extracting Name from Incident 'Description'

JW22 — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 19:17:23 GMT

Hi All,

We currently have a new inbound action that is creating incidents with employee details such as name, location, action date, etc. passed into the 'Description' field within the incident (see below). We've created a flow designer to extract the location into our 'Location' field, but I'm looking for any recommendations on how we could best extract the name and action date into the incident fields? Has anyone ever used a flow designer to extract something like this before? Or would a business rule work best?

Thanks in advance!

Example of Description body:

Employee Details

--------------------------------------------------

Employee Name................: John Smith

When to Action:

Date.........................: 04/11/2023

--------------------------------------------------

Office Details

--------------------------------------------------

Office Location..............: California

Re: Extracting Name from Incident 'Description'

DUGGI — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 20:30:28 GMT

1) Extract the employee name:

Add a new "Transform Data" action to your flow.
Select the "Description" field as the input data.
Use a regular expression to extract the employee name from the description field. For example, the regular expression Employee Name\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.: (.+) would match the employee name in the sample data you provided.
Map the output of the regular expression to the "Short Description" field of the incident record.

2) Extract the action date:

Add a new "Transform Data" action to your flow.
Select the "Description" field as the input data.
Use a regular expression to extract the action date from the description field. For example, the regular expression Date\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.\\.: (.+) would match the action date in the sample data you provided.
Map the output of the regular expression to a custom date field on the incident record.

Re: Extracting Name from Incident 'Description'

Tony Chatfield1 — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 20:54:33 GMT

Hi, if you were able to access the source and tidy up\remove the unnecessary '................ 'formatting it would be a lot cleaner. As an alternative to the regex solution, you will be able to use substring() and indexOf() to extract your values and I think this makes your intentions clearer to future users\developers.

var test = current.short_description; var indexStart = test.indexOf('Employee Name'); var indexSize = test.indexOf(':', indexStart); var indexEnd = test.indexOf('\n', indexStart); var myString = test.substring(indexStart + (indexSize - indexStart), indexEnd).trim(); gs.info(myString);

Re: Extracting Name from Incident 'Description'

JW22 — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 21:03:57 GMT

Hi Duggi, thanks for the quick reply. How would I set the regular expression to look for the employee name?

Re: Extracting Name from Incident 'Description'

DUGGI — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 21:42:18 GMT

you need to create a flow variable and pass it to the short description while creating an incident

Re: Extracting Name from Incident 'Description'

JW22 — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 18:18:36 GMT

Thanks Tony, this is helpful. Is this meant to be a business rule or through flow designer? Much appreciated!

Re: Extracting Name from Incident 'Description'

Ian Mildon — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 18:45:33 GMT

Here's a quick example of a script you can add directly to the Inbound Action to get the name from the email. On the target field, I used "name" as the example, so insert the relevant field there.

var extractName = email.body_text; var getName = []; getName = extractName.toString().split(": "); // split just before the name var splVal = getName[1].split("\n"); // split at carrage return after name current.name.setDisplayValue(splVal[0]); // value between the two splits

Re: Extracting Name from Incident 'Description'

Tony Chatfield1 — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 22:02:56 GMT

This would be configured as is for a BR, but the basic syntax is the bsame and you would just have to map to flow input\output variables.

Re: Extracting Name from Incident 'Description'

JW22 — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 19:54:30 GMT

Thanks Ian, I appreciate it. The challenge here unfortunately is that there's multiple colons throughout the template.

Re: Extracting Name from Incident 'Description'

Ian Mildon — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:55:59 GMT

If you are wanting additional values extracted that are after the first colon, just keep creating new "splits" and numbering them appropriately: 0 for what is in front of the split point and 1 for what is after the split point.

And just because I used the ":" as the split point, you could swap it for "Name...............: " to make it more unique.