Alerts are email notifications that are sent when data is changed in a database. TrackVia's alerts can be highly specific, for example notifying you when a specific record is deleted, or when records are changed to meet specific criteria. This article describes TrackVia's two types of alerts, how to manage alerts, and several details about how they work.

Alert types. TrackVia has two types of alerts: record-based alerts, and view-based alerts.

A record-based alert notifies you about changes to a single, specific record. You can elect to be notified when the record changes, when it's deleted, or both. To add a record-based alert, go to the record's detail page, then click the alerts link in the upper-right corner. You can also add many record-based alerts at once by using the checkboxes next to each record in a view or search results. Then click Continue and choose the add alerts option. (Note, though, that using a view-based alert is often more practical than adding dozens of record-based alerts.)

A view-based alert notifies you about changes to any record in the view. Using view-based alerts with filtered views allows your alerts to be highly specific. To add a view-based alert, run the view, then click on the alerts link in the upper-right corner.

As an example of how a view-based alert can be used with a filtered view, suppose you have a view called High-Priority Tasks, which has a filter that specifies that the Priority field must be set to high. If you add an alert for this view, you are choosing to be notified about changes to high-priority tasks only. When creating the alert, you can further specify which of the following actions should trigger an alert:

• a new task is added to the database with Priority set to high
• an existing task is changed to join the view, that is, its Priority field is set to high from something else
• an existing task is changed and stays in the view, that is, its Priority was high before and after the change
• an existing task is changed to leave the view, that is, its Priority changed from high to something else
• a high-priority task is deleted

A single alert on this view can include any or all of those conditions.

Managing Alerts. To see all of the alerts in the database that you're a recipient of, click the Manage Alerts link in the Tools section of the Database Overview page. From this page, you can delete or unsubscribe from alerts, edit alerts (unless you're a normal user and the alert was created by an account administrator), and view the alert's details.

There is also a built-in view called Records you have alerts for that you can run from the Views List. It will show you all records that have record-based alerts that you're a recipient of. You can use the checkboxes next to each alert in this view to remove all alerts on these records, or a subset of them.

Finally, the Views List will display an (A) after any view that has an alert you're a recipient of.

Alert suppression. Only one alert is sent to each recipient for each action taken in TrackVia, even if the action changed multiple records and would trigger multiple alerts. For example, suppose you select 10 records at once using the checkboxes next to each record in a set of search results. You click Continue and change the value of a field for all 10 records. Furthermore, suppose you have 5 different views that contain those records and also contain view-based alerts. Rather than send you 50 email notifications, TrackVia will just send you just one. The email will list the 10 records that were changed in your single action. The email will also contain a link to the Manage Alerts page, which will then highlight the 5 alerts (among your dozens of alerts) that triggered the email.

Another type of suppression TrackVia offers is to not send an alert to the person making the change. This is the default behavior, but may be changed when an alert is added or edited (it's the last option on the Edit Alert page).

What Triggers Alerts. Alerts are triggered by any change to data made from TrackVia's user interface, including directly editing a record, using the edit-all format of a view, using the checkboxes to change many records at once, and importing data from Excel. Alerts are also triggered by records that come into TrackVia from a website form, from email collection, or from TrackVia's API. Alerts are not triggered when a record is updated solely as the result of TrackVia's relational data consistency mechanisms, meaning when TrackVia updates a child record because a parent record changed. In addition, alerts are not triggered by the passage of time, unless there is also a change in data. This means that if you have a filtered view called Tasks Due Today, at midnight TrackVia will not send alerts for all tasks that "joined" the view solely as a result of the date change. (For that purpose, use a Distribution Schedule instead.)

Alerts and Permissions. Like the rest of TrackVia's features, the Alerts feature adheres to permissions you have set up for normal users. This means:

• A normal user will never receive an alert for a record they don't have permission to view.
• A normal user will not receive an alert if the only change to a record is to fields the normal user can't view.
• The email version of the record, and the History section, will not include information about any fields the normal user can't view.

Because of these permission constraints, different users might receive different notification emails from the same action. For example, the email might differ in the list of records that changed.

In addition, normal users cannot change alerts created by administrators. They also cannot add other recipients to alerts they create, nor see the other recipients that might exist on alerts they're subscribed to. They can, however, remove themselves as a recipient from any alert, even those created by administrators.