Custom fields on transactions

RT Users
1

I’ve been using RT with various custom fields for years, but now its
time to re-model those custom fields a bit. I thought that at least
one of them, namely “Work By” (which includes a list of which
technicians worked on the ticket), should get moved to the transaction
level (vs. applying to the ticket) so that it would be easier to make
data entries.

Currently, I have to search for all resolved tickets and then read
them and then apply the correct names. This is cumbersome. So my
hope is that al the techs could just tag their own name (and the names
of anyone who helped them) whenever they made a comment or reply on
the ticket.

So I started playing with a new custom field named “test” to see if
this would work. It seems OK for entering data, but I haven’t found a
way to search based on that custom field.

Did I miss something? Are custom fields on transactions just not very
useful? What kinds of goals should they be used to meet?

Any advise is appreciated.

Thanks,
Jaime

Network Administrator
Cairo-Durham Central School District
http://cns.cairodurham.org

2

Excerpts from Jaime Kikpole’s message of Thu Jun 14 07:50:35 -0400 2012:

I’ve been using RT with various custom fields for years, but now its
time to re-model those custom fields a bit. I thought that at least
one of them, namely “Work By” (which includes a list of which
technicians worked on the ticket), should get moved to the transaction
level (vs. applying to the ticket) so that it would be easier to make
data entries.

Currently, I have to search for all resolved tickets and then read
them and then apply the correct names. This is cumbersome. So my
hope is that al the techs could just tag their own name (and the names
of anyone who helped them) whenever they made a comment or reply on
the ticket.

The most straightforward way to approach this is to write a little Scrip
which adds anyone who touches a ticket to either your ticket-level
“Work By” CustomField or to the ticket AdminCcs.

That way the tracking happens automatically at the ticket level (where
it’s easy to search for) rather than your techs having to tag themselves
on each transaction.

  • Kevin
3

Dnia 2012-06-14, czw o godzinie 07:50 -0400, Jaime Kikpole pisze:

I’ve been using RT with various custom fields for years, but now its
time to re-model those custom fields a bit. I thought that at least
one of them, namely “Work By” (which includes a list of which
technicians worked on the ticket), should get moved to the transaction
level (vs. applying to the ticket) so that it would be easier to make
data entries.

Currently, I have to search for all resolved tickets and then read
them and then apply the correct names. This is cumbersome. So my
hope is that al the techs could just tag their own name (and the names
of anyone who helped them) whenever they made a comment or reply on
the ticket.

So I started playing with a new custom field named “test” to see if
this would work. It seems OK for entering data, but I haven’t found a
way to search based on that custom field.

Did I miss something? Are custom fields on transactions just not very
useful? What kinds of goals should they be used to meet?

Any advise is appreciated.

I don’t get it. Anyone, who worked on the ticket should leave a
comment/reply, so you can obtain the list of people who worked on a
ticket by parsing ticket transactions.
Therefore your CF is redundunt to built-in functionality and according
to Occam’s razor you just shouldn’t use it.

Regards,
Robert Wysocki
administrator systemów linuksowych
Contium S.A., http://www.contium.pl

4

Anyone, who worked on the ticket should leave a
comment/reply, so you can obtain the list of people who worked on a
ticket by parsing ticket transactions.

Is there a way to get a list of tickets based on who left comments? I didn’t see that in the search or chart features in the GUI. If that does exist, that would definitely be preferable. I’ve been looking for that in every version of RT since 2.0.x.

Therefore your CF is redundunt to built-in functionality and according
to Occam’s razor you just shouldn’t use it.

I’ll agree that it’s redundant if this functionality exists in the GUI, but I haven’t found it.

Thanks,
Jaime

P.S. - As a side note, you might want to double check the definition of Occam’s Razor. You seem to be using a common misinterpretation.