HipChat

Description

HipChat is the chat service you've been looking for. Collaborate in real-time with persistent rooms, painless file sharing, searchable chat history, and apps that run on everything. Hook up notifications from 40+ tools and services, or use our API to build your own.

How to install

By using Zendesk targets, you can send a message to a Hipchat room letting you know if a ticket has been created or even updated. You will need from Hipchat the room id you want the message to go to and a API key. Login to Hipchat and goto your Admin page, click API Tokens and then Create another token.

The easiest way to get the room ID is to go to Chat History and click on the room. The ID is displayed in the URL.

The Hipchat API documentation can be found here, the specific API to send messages is here. There are four required parameters needed in the POST call in the URL

Auth required

Yes (details)

Parameters

• room_id Required. ID or name of the room.
• from Required. Name the message will appear be sent from. Must be less than 15 characters long. May contain letters, numbers, -, _, and spaces.

• message Required. The message body. Must be valid XHTML. HTML entities must be escaped (e.g.: &amp ;instead of &). May contain basic tags: a, b, i, strong, em, br, img. 5000 characters max.

  You can also set two more optional parameter. Since target can't accept data other then status the format will be ignored by Zendesk.

• notify Boolean flag of whether or not this message should trigger a notification for people in the room (based on their individual notification preferences). 0 = false, 1 = true. (default: 0)

• format Desired response format: json or xml. (default: json)

  To create a target in Zendesk go to Manage=>Targets and select add target. Select URL target from the options. You will have to build the URL you want to send. All messages are sent to the same URL http://api.hipchat.com/v1/rooms/message? the combination of the authtoken and roomid routes the message to the correct room. You can use Zendesk placeholders for the from and message parts of the URL. In the example below I use ""Zendesk"" as the from and {{ticket.title}} as the message posted to chat.

Because Hipchat uses the message and if you set the attribute name to message the target doesn't send the hipchat message block. So just change the target attribute to something like hipchatnotification

Now you have to create a trigger to fire the target. The example below demonstrates a simple one based on a tag. It will send the subject line every time the ticket is updated. One thing to note you have to have a message in the trigger message body. Anything will do even just one character.