Add TFS Work Tickets to OmniFocus

At work we use Microsoft Team Foundation Server to assign tasks & work tickets. When someone assigns me a work ticket I get an email with a subject like ‘so and so assigned you work ticket 12345 – fix some bug’. It would be really useful if they could be automatically added as a task to OmniFocus.

I looked at OmniFocus’ mail rule for creating new tasks, but unfortunately it won’t work with TFS work ticket notifications because it requires a specially formatted email.

Using that script as an inspiration, I came up with this script that creates a new task with the message linked to the note field. I’m sharing it just in case anyone else finds it useful.

First you’ll need to create a mail rule that filters messages matching the criteria of the subject ‘assigned you work ticket’ and the TFS notification email address as the sender.

Here’s the mail action script:

using terms from application "Mail"

	on process_message(theMessage)
		tell application "OmniFocus"
			log "OmniFocus calling process_message in MailAction script"
		end tell
		set theSubject to subject of theMessage
		set p to offset of "Work Ticket" in theSubject
		set theSubject to characters p through end of theSubject as string
		set theText to "message:%3C" & message id of theMessage & "%3E"
		tell application "OmniFocus"
			tell default document
				set ctx to context "Work"
				make new inbox task with properties {name:theSubject, note:theText, context:ctx}
			end tell
		end tell
	end process_message

	on perform mail action with messages theMessages
		try
			set theMessageCount to count of theMessages
			repeat with theMessageIndex from 1 to theMessageCount
				my process_message(item theMessageIndex of theMessages)
			end repeat
		on error m number n
			tell application "OmniFocus"
				log "Exception in Mail action: (" & n & ") " & m
			end tell
		end try
	end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from