Can I realize my wishes?

I recently started to use RT to keep track of the development work in
our group. There are a few configuration changes I’d like to make if
possible to make work in this setting easier:

  • To have the most important information in a ticket displayed on a
    page without scrolling the web browser, I’d like to change the layout
    to show first the basics, and then the history in most-recent-first
    order. The rest should be shown below the history.

  • Since we are dealing with long-lasting projects, the default time
    unit of “minutes” is too short. Is it possible to get a queue to
    represent another unit like hours or days (where a day obviously is
    8 hours) or weeks (5 days…). Having these floating point numbers
    would make it possible to represent a half-hour project as well.

Any help to this novice is appreciated.

Rob

Rob W.W. Hooft rob.hooft@bruker-nonius.com
R&D, Bruker Nonius BV, Delft
http://www.nonius.nl/

There are a few configuration changes I’d like to make …

  • To have the most important information in a ticket displayed on a
    page without scrolling the web browser …

The look of individual pages is one of the easiest things to change.
‘RT’ has been designed well to expect people to want to make these sorts
of changes, and it’s simple to slot in new HTML::Mason objects to
override the default behaviour.

The page you want to modify has /Ticket/Display.html in its URL. Find
that file under $MasonComponentRoot. Copy it to an equivalent place
under $MasonLocalComponentRoot. Make a spurious change to the latter
and check that your version is now being used instead of the original.
(I can’t remember if you have to stop and start ‘Apache’ for it to
notice.)

I didn’t know any HTML::Mason until I started customizing ‘RT’, but it’s
fairly obvious how things work, and the ‘RT’-specific things tend to
have meaningful names. Juggle things around on that page till you’re
happy with them.

Many of the page elements are in separate files, to make them easier to
customize. Simply copy any you want to customize from /Ticket/Elements/
to your local tree.

  • Since we are dealing with long-lasting projects, the default time
    unit of “minutes” is too short. Is it possible to get a queue to
    represent another unit like hours or days …

Presumably you’re referring to the ‘Time Worked’ field here? This isn’t
something I’ve ever played with, but again all you’re asking for is an
interface change.

Find the element(s) that display(s) the time worked. Put in a bit of
arithmetic which divides the number ‘RT’ has by 60 (or 60 * 8, or
whatever) and display that instead; ‘RT’ will never know.

Similarly for input, find which page(s) accept time values in minutes.
Put some multiplication in the <%INIT%> block on those page(s) so that
the number is converted to the units ‘RT’ expects.

That way nothing inside ‘RT’ has changed; you’re just transforming the
number one way on output and t’other way on input.

Smylers
GBdirect