topic Re: Using Hidden Properties (Last email date and Last email activity) in Workflow Triggers in Tickets & Conversations

Using Hidden Properties (Last email date and Last email activity) in Workflow Triggers

KariAlder — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 20:32:35 GMT

Hello,

My team receives a large volume of Conversations that become Tickets. We have tried for months to create a workflow that reopens a Ticket and changes the status to 'Response' when a reply is received to a Closed Conversation. There is a HubSpot action (a customer replies to an email) that changes the status to 'Response' but we only want to apply it to Tickets that have been Closed.

My most recent effort to enable this referred to this solution on mergeyourdata.com:

Go into your Support Pipeline > Automate (Tab in the bottom window with the Statuses) > Click "View Workflow" (Hover over "A customer repliese to an email"), this will bring you to the workflow Hubspot uses to reopen a ticket.
Go to the More button in the upper right of the canvas, then click on Clone
When this new workflow opens, rename it whatever you'd like. Then open the workflow trigger.
Change the Last email date was updated after Ticket Status to Last message received date was updated after Ticket Status
Change the Last email activity is any of Email received from contact to Last message from visitor is equal to "True".
Add an AND filter. Set this filter to Last message received date "is known". This means that when this property changes, it'll trigger the workflow.

This sounded super promising... until I realized that the option to select 'Last message received date' was greyed out. The hover message said 'not supported for calculated properties.'

I tried cloning this workflow so I could change the trigger, as well as tried building it from scratch, and ran into the same problem. I tried diving into 'calculated properties,' which just resulted in a rabbit hole I don't have time for.

Has anyone else had this problem? Can anyone suggest a solution? Or maybe at least explain why there are 'hidden' properties I can't use although they are required to create what I need? Any help or direction is appreciated!

Re: Using Hidden Properties (Last email date and Last email activity) in Workflow Triggers

karstenkoehler — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 04:36:26 GMT

Hi @KariAlder,

If this is what you're trying to do...

@KariAlder wrote:

We have tried for months to create a workflow that reopens a Ticket and changes the status to 'Response' when a reply is received to a Closed Conversation. There is a HubSpot action (a customer replies to an email) that changes the status to 'Response' but we only want to apply it to Tickets that have been Closed.

... wouldn't it suffice to simply add a filter to the enrollment criteria to only enroll closed tickets (AND Ticket pipeline and status is any of closed) and keep the rest the same?

Your correct, these 'hidden' properties cannot be selected from a list, they're only there when cloned and not otherwise accessible.

Best regards

Re: Using Hidden Properties (Last email date and Last email activity) in Workflow Triggers

Nicos — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 15:59:48 GMT

Your correct, these 'hidden' properties cannot be selected from a list, they're only there when cloned and not otherwise accessible.

Hi, is there any good reason why this is the case?
The builtin workflow to re-open a ticket after a new email comes in is too strict for our use case and we would like to modify the original trigger, but unfortunately when we clone it we can't reuse these hidden properties in the way we want

Re: Using Hidden Properties (Last email date and Last email activity) in Workflow Triggers

Jaycee_Lewis — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 19:10:57 GMT

Hey @Nicos 👋 The best way to understand these warnings is to have you or your dev make a recuest to the Properties API and look at the metadata for the rpeorpety.

GET https://api.hubapi.com/crm/v3/properties/ticket?archived=false

A more technical answer for you and for @KariAlder

The reason you cannot use the Last message received date property in your workflow trigger is that it's a calculation roll-up property, which is not supported by workflow filters (as seen in the original screenshot).

The property's own API data confirms this. The JSON metadata for the hs_last_message_received_at property defines it as a calculated field:

 
      "fieldType": "calculation_rollup",
      "calculated": true,

More detail — This is because the value of a calculated property isn't static like a traditional property; its value is determined dynamically. This technical difference prevents the workflow system from using it as a reliable trigger in the way you want.

Best,

Jaycee