Hello -
Firstly, RT rocks. “Nice work!” to the fine folks at Best Practical. I
have a workflow question related to RTFM articles and resolving RT
tickets. I have googled and poked through the mailing list archives and
haven’t seen what I am looking for.
Can someone tell me what is the best practice to tie tickets to RTFM
articles (mostly for later reporting)? I realize the “refers to” field
offers this functionality (like doing “a:###”), but in terms of a good
work flow, you’d have to keep a printed list of RTFM article IDs to make
using that convenient unless I am missing something (which I fully
acknowledge I could be).
Is there an easier/better way to tie RT tickets to RTFM articles? I
suppose I could always alter the resolve ticket screen to include the
"refers to" field – maybe this is the way to go? And maybe have this
field populated when an RTFM article is chosen as the response.
Again, the goal here would be that you could easily see how may tickets
are related to a given problem (which was defined in an RTFM article in
some fashion) by querying or looking in RTFM at a given article.
Running:
RT 3.6.6
RTFM 2.2.1
on CentOS 5.1
Apache 2.2.3
Thanks for any tips and I apologize in advance if I have overlooked
something.
Steve
Ok, so I answered some of my own question. After much testing, I have
determined that:
If you are on the “Resolve ticket” screen (i.e.
Update.html?Action=Respond&DefaultStatus=resolved&id=X), the page
includes a hidden form field named aptly “-RefersTo”.
* If you choose an RTFM article from the drop-down menu, click the
"Go" button, the text box does get populated with the text of your
RTFM custom article, but the value of the hidden field does not
change, NOT establishing a relationship from this ticket to the
RTFM article.
* If you search in the field labeled "Search for RTFM articles
matching" and click the "Go" button, then click the "Go" button
next to the subject of a matching RTFM article, the hidden field
DOES get populated, with text looking something like:
"fsck.com-rtfm://mydomain.com/article/<article id />", which, of
course, establishes the relationship between the ticket and the
RTFM article when you post your response using the "Update Ticket"
button.
* For completeness, if you use the "Include RTFM article:" field, it
also does NOT populate the hidden RefersTo field.
Not sure if this qualifies as a bug, but it sure seems like one, since
the middle process ends in what I would expect (and hope for!) so that
we could report out on numbers of tickets resolved with the same canned
response – another easy way of seeing how frequently a given problem is
causing our team a headache. I would expect that using an RTFM by any
of the three means would end in tying the response to the RTFM article
via the RefersTo field.
Along these same lines – can someone point me to something that would
allow me to change the formatting of responses such that RTFM articles
aren’t always included at the top of the response? This is especially
important when there is the initial user inquiry and respondant’s
signature below.
Thanks for any insights here. I am happy to document any
improvements/changes we end up making for the next person.
Steve
Not sure if this qualifies as a bug, but it sure seems like one, since
the middle process ends in what I would expect (and hope for!) so that
we could report out on numbers of tickets resolved with the same
canned
response – another easy way of seeing how frequently a given
problem is
causing our team a headache. I would expect that using an RTFM by any
of the three means would end in tying the response to the RTFM article
via the RefersTo field.
Would you mind reporting this to rtfm-bugs@bestpractical.com so
we can have a look and see about fixing it in the dev branch?
Along these same lines – can someone point me to something that would
allow me to change the formatting of responses such that RTFM articles
aren’t always included at the top of the response? This is especially
important when there is the initial user inquiry and respondant’s
signature below.
The code that adds in the output lives in html/Callbacks/RTFM/Elements/
MessageBox/Default
but when you look at where that code is called from Elements/
MessageBox you’ll see that
you’re going to have to do a bit of work to get it to show up anywhere
but at the start of the box.
-kevin