I am really enjoying the new feature of having the ability to pull information from external sources. This seems very beneficial for automatically pulling information such as customer or device information.
The most efficient use of this feature appears to be querying data based off a value from another field in the ticket/customer form (#{ticket.customObject})
For the api call to trigger, you need to manually select the external data source object, type some data, then the results will display using the ticket variable value that has been set in the API call.
If we had the ability to define a trigger that would activate the external data source object and select a value, such as a ticket update or field value change, that would greatly improve the usefulness of this feature. If we could take this one step further and listen for a live change on the field that is being searched, such as by using the JavaScript event ‘OnFocusOut’ that would be huge for pulling the data live to confirm the search is valid.
I know this feature is very new, and I look forward to seeing the improvements to it in the near future!