Understanding Outbound Actions and Best Practices

Outbound Actions allows users to send data entered into Allocadia to another system, like Salesforce, via either an email or a URL action, eliminating duplication of efforts in multiple systems. Actions are built into Allocadia using the Freemarker template engine. The field name reference gets set based on the column name at the time the action is created. If the column name changes after the action is created, the field name reference will remain the same for that action. In this way, the action will not break if the column name changes. However, if you are creating a new action, the field name references may be different.

Email Action

The Email Action allows users to trigger an email with the activity details from Allocadia. The broadest application for this type of action is to use Salesforce Email Services to parse the emailed campaign data from Allocadia to automatically create the campaign.

URL Action

The main use of Open URL (query strings) is to populate the content of an HTML web form:

• The query string is composed of a series of field-value pairs.
• Within each pair, the field name and value are separated by an equals sign, '='.
• The series of pairs are separated by the ampersand, '&'.
• For each field of the form, the query string contains a pair field=value. Web forms may include fields not visible to the user; these fields are included in the query string when the form is submitted. 

The URL action will only work if the web form accepts query strings. You will want to perform an initial test to validate if the form will work with outbound actions without any other custom development work. If this test is successful, you will want to have:

• All the field names (and ids) of the fields that you would like populated from Allocadia
• The possible values/ranges/formats of the fields on your PR form