Automatically notifying activity participants via email in Creatio (formerly bpm’online)

A lot of calendar apps, like Google Calendar for example, allow you to notify participants with an email. This functionality doesn’t exist in Creatio but it’s easy to add. In this article I will show you how to make a process that allows you to send emails to participants of an activity.

For the first step you have to go to activity section and create a checkbox. We’ll use this checkbox so the user can decide if they want to send a email to the participants. You can make this anywhere but I made mine in the participants tab.

We’re going to add boolean field on activity participant to keep track of which participant we’ve sent an email to. Head over to the configuration and click the add button and choose replacing object.

When creating the replacing object make sure the parent object is activity participant. Then you will go to the columns and add a boolean, name it email sent then go and publish it. Next we will go work on our process that will do the work and send the email to the participants.

We’ll have two different ways of getting the process to activate and both are signal start events. The first signal will activate once the activity is saved and the notify participants checkbox is checked. The other signal activates when the checkbox is already checked and the activity is already saved but you add a new participant. My process looks like this.

Basically my process starts on the two signals and starts by reading the activity. Then it loops through all of the activity participants that have not yet received the email. It gathers information about the activity and the participant. After it is done gathering the information it will send out an email to the participant and then will set the boolean email sent field to take them out of the loop. This is the key to all of this is how it loops through the records. To loop through records in a process you have to have some kind of condition for reading the records that you modify in the loop so that record doesn’t get returned from the read the next time it loops. In this process that condition is that the participant email sent field is false. Then after we send them the email we change that value to true so that the next time we read the participants that record isn’t returned. The process has a property called maximum number of repetitions that defaults to 100, so if there is a chance you’ll have to loop through more then 100 records you’ll need to adjust that value.

It’s not likely that you’ll have a activity with over a hundred participants so you’ll probably be safe with the default.