Create template tickets

Is it possible to create template tickets? For example, applications for servicing printers, applications for installing applications.

Can you explain some more what you expect this to look like?

You can’t create template tickets but you could have different queues with different custom fields or set some default values based on a “type” custom field

You’re right this is good idea. Thank you.

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An additional option we’ve used here is making local custom form for ticket creation. These are useful for requesting services as they can validate what the user is entering before creating the ticket. For example when requesting an SSL certificate we ensure that the request comes with a CSR, the CSR meets some of our security criteria, etc before we create a ticket in a queue for the team to go and make the cert. A bit more work for us RT hackers initially and you need to be comfortable hacking on Perl and Mason scripts but pays dividends over time for the users.

Another “hack” is setting up links to pre-populate some fields in the ticket creation script. We do that with some of our change tickets for example, adding the links to our custom menus via the Callbacks mechanism.

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A couple of variations on this theme have come up for me in the past.

To ask questions of an unprivileged user before creating a ticket based on their answers, I built an extension which allowed the creation of a multi-stage submission form. Each page of the form would ask questions (such as asking them to select the type of request from a drop-down list, or providing a free-text box to describe a problem), and which questions the form asked on the next page might depend on their answers so far. Then at the end a summary of all the questions and answers would be dropped into a ticket.

To allow a privileged user to create a new ticket based on the contents of an old ticket, I built a separate extension to allow existing (inactive) tickets to be designated as templates. The administrator would define which groups would be allowed to use these templates. Then, on the ticket creation form for that queue, members of those groups would see a drop-down list of available templates at the top of the form; choosing a template would load the template ticket’s metadata into the creation form for them to modify before submitting the new ticket.

These were built for RT 4.4.x. I don’t know if such features exist in RT 5. If not, and there is any interest in either of the options above, I would be happy to write new open-source versions of the extensions I’ve described above. (The second of the two above would be easier!)

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Today I’ve released the first version of RT::Extension::TemplateTickets. This allows you to designate tickets as templates for future ticket creation (by privileged users), and choose which fields to carry over into the new ticket. You can also choose to include child tickets.

The templates are intended for use by other privileged users, not by unprivileged users. The idea is that they would be used by technical staff (such as submitting change requests) or would be used by first-line support on behalf of a customer (such as requests for new equipment, and so on).

It’s been developed on RT 4.2.16, 4.0.4, and 5.0.1 and seems to work OK for me, but has had only minimal testing so far.

Hopefully the tutorial in the README is enough to get new users started. I’m open to any comments, suggestions, patches, bug reports, etc.

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Hey Andrew,
Have you tested this for 5.0.2 yet? I am having issues installing which could be my own but I thought it might be a compatibility thing so I thought I would check with you first.

  • Thanks!

I haven’t tested it in 5.0.2 myself, but I wouldn’t have expected there to be any problems with that version. If you’re still having problems, please let me know.