Why my trigger did not fire

The ticket events tell you exactly which rules ran. Six causes cover almost every trigger that did not.

The ticket events tell you exactly which rules ran. Six causes cover almost every trigger that did not.

Symptoms

• A trigger you built does nothing on tickets that look like they match.
• It worked and then stopped.
• It fires on some tickets and not others.

Start with the events

Open the ticket, look at the events for the update in question. Every rule that ran is listed with what it changed. If your trigger is not there, it did not match. If it is there and the field is wrong, something later overwrote it.

That one step separates "did not fire" from "fired and was undone", which have completely different causes.

Resolution steps

1. It is inactive

Worth checking first because it takes two seconds.

2. Contradictory conditions

Two values of one field in the all block. Nothing matches.

3. Is where you needed changed to

Or the reverse. A rule using "changed to" fires only on the update where it became true, so testing on a ticket already in that state shows nothing.

4. Something later overwrote it

It fired correctly and a trigger further down set the field again. The events show both.

5. The field is not on the ticket's form

A condition on a field the form does not carry behaves unexpectedly.

6. The ticket is closed or archived

Business rules do not touch either. Nothing warns you.

See also

• Building conditions: all, any, and the trap in between
• The order of triggers and why it matters
• Where my old tickets went: about ticket archiving