New Registration and Attendee Status

[girlsempowermentnetwork]

I have a Process Builder that is triggered on the creation of a new Attendee record (meaning it doesn't fire when the Attendee record is updated). One of the conditions I've included is based on the Attendee Status field being equal to "Authorized". However, we are now having issues where the worfklow isn't triggering leading me to wonder how the Attendee Status field works exactly.

There are are 3 status values: Pending, Authorized, and Declined. Is there documentation that would tell me under what conditions these get set to the different values?

For example, if there is a new registration and the credit card is declined do the Attendee records get created but set to a status of Declined? Then if the person fixes the credit card issue and resubmits, does it update the Attendee Status to "Authorized"? Just trying to make sure I am writing my workflow correctly. Thanks.

[CnP.LiveSupport.AB]

There is no documentation. Attendees are always created by Event Management with a Status of Pending. It is changed to Authorized when the Click & Pledge Account feeds the transaction information back into Salesforce, and PaaS picks it up to finish processing it.

It is good practice to set up processes on create only, since this limits the number of times the record has to be 'touched', but I do not recommend trying to set criteria with a condition basedon the Attendee Status value. If you must have the Status as a condition, add a scheduling aspect to the rule so that the status is not reviewed until well after you would expect the transaction to have returned to Salesforce and populated the native objects.

[girlsempowermentnetwork]

Not a bad suggestion but how long is reasonable? 1hr?

[CnP.LiveSupport.AB]

It likely depends on how quickly you might process Temporary Contacts. If you're super-on-top of processing Temporary Contacts, then an hour might be enough, but if not, a day might be better.

But honestly, I don't know that it's a great approach to managing your problem. I still don't think relying on the Attendee Status to run your automation is a great idea. What are you trying to do with your automation, that you're making it dependent on Attendee Status?

[girlsempowermentnetwork]

The automation is tying event registrations through C&P with a Program Management app we have for managing our programs. So when an Attendee is "Authorized" we automatically "Enroll" them in our Program (which ties into a whole host of other things...). I think I might take a different approach and set up a nightly update or something.

[CnP.LiveSupport.AB]

At the moment, I'm only thinking of two other ways to approach the problem, but I don't think either is a better solution than using Attendee Status.

1. Removing the Attendee Status condition entirely. Then, of course, you may create more problems cleaning up the automations that shouldn't have been triggered after-the-fact. If that were a simple operation, it might be worth it, but it sounds more complex than that.
2. Creating a Custom field on the Opportunity to hold the Attendee Contact, use the mapping under Event Name > Additional Information to populate it, and use that to trigger the automation. This also causes a need to wait, because once the Opportunity is created, NPSP has to run an update, then PaaS runs updates for custom mappings from C&P Settings.