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Requiring certain fields with submitted incidents
Answer ID 780   |   Last Review Date 06/10/2022

How do we set the fields and drop-down menus to be required before the customer can submit a question?

Environment:

Customer Portal CP v3.x, Ask a Question page
Oracle B2C Service

Resolution:

The steps to set a field as required when submitting an Ask a Question request depend on which field you wish to set.

Important! The information below only affects incidents created from Ask a Question submittals. Incidents created from other sources such as:

  • email requests (if EGW_ENABLED is set to Yes),
  • answer or site feedback, or
  • responses to mailings


...cannot require fields to be filled out since the submittal method does not give the contact the opportunity to set the fields. For example, when an email is submitted, there is no way for the contact to set a product, category or other custom field. Similarly, when an incident is created from answer or site feedback, there is no means for the contact to set product, category, or custom fields that are required on the Ask a Question page.

You can set up business rules to set custom fields to a default value for incidents created from email submittals or other sources. When configuring the rule, include the Incident Source field in the IF part of the rule to specify the types of incidents that will have the fields set by the rule.


Requiring custom fields: When configuring custom fields, the Required check box makes the field required on the end-user pages (when the field is enabled for end-user visibility). This applies to both incident custom fields added to the Ask a Question page and contact custom fields enabled on the Create Account page. The Required check box also sets the default property for the custom field when it is added to a workspace. 

However, within a specific workspace, an administrator can set the Required property to Never or On New or On Edit so that the field is never required or only sometimes required when the record is edited from the Oracle B2C Service Console. 

As a result, for incidents created from the administrative console, some fields may not be required -- even if the fields are required from the end-user pages.

 

Product and Category Fields

For Customer Portal CP3

Widget version 2.0.1 or lower

If you are using Customer Portal, the standard ProductCategoryInput widget can be edited to require a product or category during the incident submission.  Below are some examples of some edits made to the ProductCategoryInput widget to make the product and category required fields;

<rn:widget path="input/ProductCategoryInput" table="incidents" required_lvl="2" data_type="products"/>

<rn:widget path="input/ProductCategoryInput" table="incidents" required_lvl="2" data_type="categories" label_input="#rn:msg:CATEGORY_LBL#" label_nothing_selected="#rn:msg:SELECT_A_CATEGORY_LBL#"/>
 

CustomerPortal v3.3 and higher

Widget version 2.1.1 and higher

<rn:widget path="input/ProductCategoryInput" table="incidents" required_lvl="2" />

<rn:widget path="input/ProductCategoryInput" table="incidents" required_lvl="2"  label_input="#rn:msg:CATEGORY_LBL#" label_nothing_selected="#rn:msg:SELECT_A_CATEGORY_LBL#"/>

Incident Custom Fields

If the field(s) are custom fields included on the Ask a Question page along with the question, you can edit the configuration for that specific incident custom field and enable the Required check box so that the field is required on the Ask a Question page.

Contact Custom Fields

If the field(s) is requested when the end-user creates a new account from the end-user interface, the field is a contact custom field.