E-mail notifications allow PTC RV&S users to be notified by e-mail whenever a new item is submitted or item information changes. This is useful for staying informed about assigned items, new items that require review and approval, or state changes on existing items. More importantly, notifications allow you to respond immediately to critical items and stay informed on project progress.

The e-mail notification displays information about the item, for example, the item type, ID, summary, who edited the item and when, a hyperlink to the item, and the modified fields.

E-mail notifications are evaluated on the PTC RV&S server’s time zone; however, symbolic dates in rules are evaluated on the PTC RV&S client’s time zone.

Your administrator can define additional fields to display in e-mail notifications for specific item types.

You configure PTC RV&S to send you e-mail notification by creating rules.

The Web interface allows you to set simple e-mail notification rules, for example, receiving e-mail notification when new items are assigned to you. To create advanced e-mail notification rules, you must create them in the GUI.

A rule is a statement that sets a specified outcome when certain conditions are met. In the GUI, rules are composed of nodes and conditions. Nodes are the logical connectors that describe the relationship between two statements (or conditions). Conditions are a statement of the requirements that must be satisfied, and can involve either user or field values.

For example, you could create a simple rule containing one condition that sends you e-mail every time a new problem is submitted that is assigned to you. Similarly, you could create a complex rule containing two conditions that sends you e-mail every time a new problem is submitted that is assigned to you, and when existing problems become assigned to you. Rules can contain as many conditions as you want.

An operator is a function used to create e-mail notification rules in the GUI. The meaning of the operator depends on whether the field you are using in the filter or rule is single-valued or multi-valued, for example, the = operator means “equals” for single-valued fields and “contains” for multi-valued fields.

The logical and node indicates that all of the specified conditions must be true to meet the requirements of the rule.

The logical or node indicates that one or more of the specified conditions must be true to meet the requirements of the rule.

The specific placement of the logical node is important to determining how it affects the meaning of the rule.

The following example shows an e-mail notification rule that will notify the user (administrator) each time a new change request is created or whenever a defect is assigned to the user. With the or node, the notification occurs whenever either of the events occurs.

The use of [New Value] in a rule condition indicates a change in a field value. One part of the condition indicates the field value before the change, and the other part indicates the value after the change. For example, in the rule above, Assigned User <> Assigned User[New Value] indicates that the new value of the Assigned User field is not equal to what it was before the item was saved. In other words, the value of the Assigned User field was changed during the item edit.

If document versioning is enabled, you can specify conditions for live and versioned document model items. For example, you can create an e-mail notification rule that sends an e-mail when a user edits a specific live item.

With items, you can:

With item IDs, you can:

With document IDs, you can: