Create Wrike tasks from Zendesk tickets

Different teams and departments usually have their own tools where they spend most of the day. This post covers one technique for bridging the gap between team members using Zendesk and those using Wrike.

In this post you’ll learn how to create a tag which, when applied, creates a Wrike task based on the Zendesk ticket where the tag was applied. While this approach does not provide 2-way sync, it gives you an easy (and free) integration to fill the information gap between your Zendesk tickets and Wrike tasks.

A Note About Security

The solution described in this post involves using a permanent access token to make Wrike API calls. Permanent tokens should be treated like passwords and should be stored and processed properly in order to maintain a high security level. End-to-end transport-level security is achieved via HTTPS protocol used in all Wrike API calls.

Zendesk does not allow passing permanent tokens via a request header in custom URL targets (which would be the most secure way). Instead, tokens are passed as a request parameter. Only POST requests should be used, to prevent parameters from being logged by web servers. GET requests are not allowed because sensitive data can be exposed to logging.

We strongly advise creating a dedicated “bot” user and issuing a permanent token on its behalf. This allows you to add an extra level of security by having complete control over what data is exposed to this user via selective sharing.

Before You Start

1. Generate a permanent access token. Follow these steps to generate one from the API Apps panel in your Workspace.
2. Create a Folder where new tasks will appear. You can also set up multiple Folders and use each under a different set of rules in Zendesk later.
3. Find the permalink for the Folder you created in step 2 and make an API call with it:

curl -g -X GET -H 'Authorization: bearer <access_token>' 'https://www.wrike.com/api/v4/folders?permalink=<permalink to your folder>'

Note the Folder ID in server response:

{
   "kind": "folders",
   "data": [
   {
      "id": "IEAAQA5EI4CA6NIR",
   ...

Step 1: Set Up a URL Target in Zendesk

Now it’s time to create a new target in Zendesk which will push data to Wrike. Follow these instructions to fill out the form.

• Url: https://www.wrike.com/api/v4/folders/<your Wrike folder ID>/tasks?access_token=<your permanent token>
• Method: POST
• Content type: Form encoded

Test your target before saving, to make sure new tasks are landing in the correct Folder. Only the “title” field is required:

If you get a 200 response code, that means it’s time to piece everything together:

Step 2: Create a Trigger

We’re going to set up a business rule in Zendesk so that when an agent adds the specified tag, a new task is created in Wrike and data from your ticket is added to the task’s description field.

Set Up the Trigger

      1. Create a new trigger with these conditions:

• Ticket is: Updated
• Ticket tags contains at least one of the following: push_task

      2. In this example we use only task title and description as parameters

• title: ticket ID {{ticket.id}} - {{ticket.title}}
• description: ID: {{ticket.id}} <br> Priority: {{ticket.priority}} <br> Assigned to: {{ticket.assignee.name}}

Your custom integration is ready to use as soon as you save the trigger!

Taking it a Step Further

More you can do

• Get creative with bold text and add URLs that point back to tickets. Wrike task descriptions accept some basic HTML formatting tags.
• Populate Custom Fields in tasks with data from Zendesk
• Assign tasks automatically.
• More targets can be set up to update existing tasks with comments.
• Find the full list of parameters you can pass when creating a task in our API documentation portal. 

Example

Create a Priority field on tasks in your Folder and add {{ticket.priotity}} as the value of this Custom Field when you create a task. To do this, you first need to learn respective field and user IDs (just like we did with Folders in this post).

Please let me know in the comments if some of the steps need a deeper explanation or more illustration. I'm eager to learn how you apply this and introduce it into your workflows!