Customize messagebox default reply (due to ugly $WebExternalAuth / SAML / Userid)

RT Users
1

Hi,

We are using Request Tracker 4.07 with an external SAML authentication solution. As a result, our user’s unique username is replaced by something inhuman like 131145345@sub.something.com.

When a user updates a ticket (e.g. reply) the default messagebox shows something like:

body text

Since a user is not really familiar with “1311345@sub.something.com” (this is a identifier from our SAML solution, not known by users) I would rather have something like the users e-mail address, not the username, e.g.:On Wed Mar 27 10:17:17 2013, john.doe@something.com wrote:

body text

How can I customize this (or something similar) the proper way, without “hacking” Request Trackers code (and run into problems when upgrading)?

Help is much appreciated, best regards,

Marit

2

Hi,

We are using Request Tracker 4.07 with an external SAML authentication
solution. As a result, our user’s unique username is replaced by something
inhuman like 131145345@sub.something.com.

When a user updates a ticket (e.g. reply) the default messagebox shows
something like:

body text

Since a user is not really familiar with “1311345@sub.something.com” (this
is a identifier from our SAML solution, not known by users) I would rather
have something like the users e-mail address, not the username, e.g.:

body text

How can I customize this (or something similar) the proper way, without
“hacking” Request Trackers code (and run into problems when upgrading)?

We recently extracted code that adds that line into a very small
method especially to allow people to override how that line is
generated. You need QuoteHeader method in lib/RT/Transaction.pm.
Quoting commit that added it:

commit e6cfc69c40da44fa367e1e7dad0deeae909819ac
Author: Ruslan Zakirov ruz@bestpractical.com

extract Transaction->QuoteHeader method

Code that is adding "On <date> <person> wrote:" in front of
quoted context is burried in other method, so it's hard to
change style of the quoting. Extract it into a new method.

diff --git a/lib/RT/Transaction.pm b/lib/RT/Transaction.pm
index fa0d590…47ae072 100644
— a/lib/RT/Transaction.pm
+++ b/lib/RT/Transaction.pm
@@ -381,13 +381,24 @@ sub Content {
}

     $content =~ s/^/> /gm;

  •    $content = $self->loc("On [_1], [_2] wrote:",

$self->CreatedAsString, $self->CreatorObj->Name)

  •      . "\n$content\n\n";

  •    $content = $self->QuoteHeader . "\n$content\n\n";

    }

    return ($content);
    }

+=head2 QuoteHeader
+Returns text prepended to content when transaction is quoted
+(see C argument in L). By default returns
+localized “On wrote:\n”.
+=cut
+sub QuoteHeader {

  • my $self = shift;
  • return $self->loc(“On [_1], [_2] wrote:”, $self->CreatedAsString,
    $self->CreatorObj->Name);
    +}

=head2 Addresses

Help is much appreciated, best regards,

Marit

Best regards, Ruslan.

3

We are using Request Tracker 4.07 with an external SAML authentication
solution. As a result, our user’s unique username is replaced by
something inhuman like 131145345@sub.something.com.

The ideal solution, of course, is fixing the SAML auth solution to use
something more reasonable to start with like the unique username or
email address. If you can do that, it’ll be better than playing
whack-a-mole with the places RT expects a username to be reasonable.