The Contention-Proof Case Accept Button

The case accept button is a handy thing.  It shows up on queue views to allow members of that queue to mass-accept cases (actually, in the Agent Console it shows up in the Mass Action dropdown rather than as a button, but it works the same). If you have a large queue, though, with lots of agents accepting cases at the same time, they may sometimes step on each others' toes.  If two agents accept the same cases at almost the same time, then the last one will win, and the first agent will not actually own the cases he thinks he just accepted.

Here's some custom button code I wrote which addresses this issue.  It only accepts cases that are still assigned to a queue; if the cases have been accepted by a user already, those cases will remain owned by the users who accepted them. 

To add this code, go to Setup->Cases->Buttons and Links and make a new custom button called Accept Cases (or whatever label you'd like to use for this).  Its Display Type should be set to List Button, its Behavior to Execute JavaScript, and its Content Source to OnClick JavaScript.  Paste the code from this link into the OnClick JavaScript field.  

Now you'll have to add this button to the Case list view.  To do this, go to Setup->Cases->Search Layouts.  Click Edit next to the Cases List View entry, and add your new button from the Available Buttons section to the Selected Buttons section.

So how did I do this? Quite easily really.  Perhaps the most important part is the line that invokes {!GETRECORDIDS($ObjectType.Case)}.  This little-known merge field allows you to get a list of all the IDs that are selected in a list view or related list -- really handy when you're trying to make buttons that act upon a large number of records.  Once I have the IDs of the selected records, I run them through the also little-known retrieve function to get more information about them.  The key to that retrieve call is getting Owner.Type -- that will return a string for each case containing either "Queue" or "User" depending on what the type of each case's owner is.  A good lesson here is that GETRECORDIDS plus retrieve makes for a quick and powerful combination.

Now I divide the cases into two piles: the "accept" pile for cases that are currently owned by a queue that we're going to allow this user to accept, and the "reject" pile of cases that have already been accepted by other users.  If there are any cases in the "accept" pile I call update on it to update those cases, and then I give some feedback to the user of the changes that were made (and the changes that were rejected). And there we have it: The Contention-Proof Case Accept Button.  Note that with just a couple of minor changes you can adapt this same code for use with leads and custom objects -- any object that is ownable by a queue.