CampusPulse Reporting System - Documentation
Welcome to the CampusPulse Reporting System
This page is intended to act as documentation on how to use this site to direct people towards filling out ServiceNow Tickets. This page is (in most cases) not meant to be directly viewed unless you want to know how to implement this reporting process in your system
Overall Process
Step 1: Form
The process begins with a form page, where the viewer is asked for some information. This information depends on the specific form being filled out.
These form pages can also define hidden static values that are not visible on the form page, but are passed through when submitting the form. This can help pre-fill basic values (like category) that remain static for a given form, in addition to the custom form fields that are defined on the page
Available Forms:
button.html (link)This page is used to guide students through the process of reporting broken accessible door buttons. It is expected to be used in conjunction with the room= parameter in the URL to prefill the room number in the form.
bus.html (link)This page is used to guide people through the process of reporting late or broken RIT Shuttle busses. RIT Parking and Transportation Services (PATS) requests that reports be made if a bus is as little as 5-10 min. This allows the service desk and PATS to rapidly get in contact with the transportation vendor to inquire about the location of the bus
Step 2: Destination
Each form is configured with a target destination. These help determine which reporting method that the process follows.
Reporting methods
1. Automatic Form filling
Status: Pending RIT integration
Destination ID: TBD
This method enables this site to pre-fill most or all of the information in RIT's Helpdesk forms for you by redirecting you to the RIT helpdesk with some additional data in the URL
2. Assisted Form Filling
Status: Available
Destination method ID(s): assisted, assisted-condense
Additional Values: sys_id of the catalog item to direct reports to, and optional condense_except specifying a comma separated list of fields to exclude from condensing if using the condense variant
This method simplifies the process of reporting to RIT's Helpdesk somewhat by displaying a summary page listing the values submitted to it, as well as a link to the correct helpdesk form as well as suggested values for you to copy-paste into the form
For cases where the form fields are intended to match 1:1 with the fields in the helpdesk form, the assisted type should be used (this displays each item as a separate field in the summary). If the helpdesk form has fewer fields, the assisted-condense type should be used, as this will condense any fields not specifically excluded into a "Description" field containing all the relevant information
For more information on the API of this summary page, see the Summary Section
3. Submit to intermediate database
Status: Available
Destination ID: submit
Additional Values: The URL to POST the form data to, as the location
This method will submit the form to a pre-configured endpoint via HTTP POST, allowing it to be stored in a database, or otherwise dealt with by that system. To prevent open redirect attacks, this will always redirect the user to the Success Page
The Summary Page API
The summary page is a page that displays a summary of the data submitted to it, as well as a link to the destination page. This page is a general-purpose target for all assisted page types
By default this page will display all parameters provided to it (simple example)
You can also pass "internal" values to the page. These values are different in that they aren't displayed, but can change the behavior of the page. Internal values have key names beginning with an underscore
Here is a list of these internal values:
- _sys_id: The sys_id of the ServiceNow form to submit to. if present, this will link to that catalog item using the ServiceNow domain configured, which for this site is help.rit.edu
- _condense_except: If present, this causes the summary page to display all provided values as part of a single "Description" field. This is useful for the more general forms that only offer a description box and not many other details. You can also optionally supply a comma-separated list of keys to be excluded from the condensed summary (and thus displayed as they would otherwise be)