This article covers both the InterAction queue and the priority of Activities being written back to IA.

The InterAction Queue

Most InterAction activities are written back using a queue, which allows them to be throttled and retried, in case of error or IA unavailability.

Email Open is the only activity that historically has been written back in real-time instead of through the queue. The reason for this is that we need to record the IA Activity ID in our system so we can subsequently write back Link Clicked activities into this one activity.  Our queue did not support call backs so we were not able to record the Activity ID. 

Configuration Setting

We now have a configuration setting that allows Email Opens to be written back through the queue by wrapping the whole Email Open activity creation process into an single API call that handles the write back of the IA Activity and the recording of the Activity ID in our system. 

Advantages

Once enabled,  Email Opens are added to the queue for processing instead of being written back immediately to InterAction. This reduces the load on InterAction and allows for retries in the case of failure. It also means if you need to take InterAction offline for any period of time, the queue can be stopped and Email Opens will be queued up and written back when the queue is restarted.

The configuration setting is a global setting and can be enabled by your Vuture Administrator at "Admin.System.Emails.Record Email Open Queue"

Priority of Email Sent and Email Open activities in InterAction

Configuration Setting: None required. 
Prerequisites: None. This will be automatically available for all InterAction integrations.

Activities Prioritised

To ensure that important items in the queue do not get delayed when writing back to the CRM, we have assigned a priority order to each item type as follows:

Form notifications - priority 3 (to be processed first)
Links clicked and form submissions - priority 2 
Email sent and opened activities - priority 1 (to be processed last)

This priority setting means that you may see items in the queue going through "out of order", in that a Form Notification should be sent to a contact before their Form Submission has written back to InterAction. The advantage of this setting is that Notifications will not be delayed by other Email Sent or Email Open activities writing back.