Message Center

Message Center

Message Center

The Message Center allows messages to be sent by internal users to the customer type users. They can notify customers of upcoming site maintenance, newly released promotions, or other announcements.

Messages are saved in the [MessageCenterMessages] database table. Each message is assigned a MessageId. This is an auto-incrementing number assigned by EASYProcess in order to associate messages with their attachments and keep them organized in a directory.

New Message Notifications

Users will see a notification at the top of their screen once logged in to notify them of new messages. This will contain a number of how many unread messages are available.

Once a message has been viewed, it is recorded in the [MessageCenterMessageViewedBy] database table. After it has been viewed, this particular message will no longer be summed in the count of unread messages for “Notifications” alert at the top of the page.

Targeting Message Audiences

Messages a user can see are the ones that match some criteria of the user. This means as a user, I can see messages specifically for me, for my account (Company), or for all users. This way a group of the site’s users can be targeted to receive certain messages.

Admins can create messages for the following groups:

  • All Users - This is a non filtered list of all users in the EPUsers database table. This means it is available to logged in users and not guests.
  • User Only - This allows a message to go out to one specific user from the EPUsers database table.
  • Company Only - This allows a message to go out to one specific account. The message will be available to all users existing under this account.

Categorizing Messages

Messages that are created can be assigned categories. These allow users and admins to filter the messages by related categories. These are the default categories:

How it Works/How to Change Categories

Categories are stored in the [NameValueCollection] database table with Name set to either “MessageCenterCategory1” or “MessageCenterCategory2”.  Here is what those records look like the the database.

Changing these [NameValueCollection] table records would change the Message Center feature to show, save, and filter by the newly chosen categories.

Message Attachments

Messages can have attachments. These attachments are saved to the application server in the following path:

C:\EASYProcess\[Environment]\Applications\[Application]\SavedFiles\MessageCenter\[MessageId]

A record in the “MessageCenterAttachments” database table is also saved to associate the filepath to the MessageId and the admin given description of the attachment.

Once a message goes out, the users who can view it, have the ability to download the attachments.