Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
A placeholder is a piece of text replaced with real data when a message goes out. It is how one trigger serves every ticket.
Where they work
- Triggers and automations, in the message they send.
- Macros, in the comment they insert.
- Email templates, including the header and footer.
- Dynamic content, so a translated message still carries real values.
Not every action in a business rule accepts them, though, and you do not have to guess which: where placeholders are supported the field carries a View available placeholders button. If there is no button, there is no substitution, and a curly-bracketed name typed there goes out exactly as typed.
What they can carry
- Ticket data: number, subject, description, status, priority, the latest comment.
- The people: requester's name, assignee's name, organisation.
- Custom fields, addressed by their ID rather than their name.
- Satisfaction, for survey messages.
The behaviour that matters
A placeholder is written between double curly brackets, {{ticket.title}}, and the name is case sensitive. Get the case wrong and you have not made a mistake Zendesk will tell you about; you have made a placeholder that refers to nothing.
Which is the same thing as the real behaviour to know: an empty placeholder resolves to nothing, and the sentence around it still goes out. "Hello ," and "Your order has shipped" are what goes out.
Testing with a ticket that is missing the data, rather than one that is complete, catches this before a customer sees it.
Where a sentence cannot survive an empty value, Liquid markup is the way out: it lets you wrap the sentence in a condition so it only appears when the field has something in it.
Two defences
- Write sentences that survive an empty value. "Hello" without a name reads fine.
- Use a Liquid conditional so the sentence only appears when there is something to say. More work, and the right answer for anything customer-facing.
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