Question about using a web form to create a request

RT Users
1

I was building a web form which I had planned to use to simply
force people to enter specific information when they created a
request, since right now our “average” request consists of “My
PC is broke.”

I have the form built, do data validation on the info and am
all ready to generate an email to create the ticket, two of
the things I’d like to allow I don’t know if I can do.

  1. I want allow them to set a “Requested By” date and have
    that be the initial due date.
  2. I want to set the initial priority based on selections
    they make on the form.

So my question is: Since the ticket isn’t created yet, it
doesn’t look like I can use “%RT SET prio xx” in the new ticket
itself, so how can I set these short of twiddling the database
myself which I was trying to avoid by generating an email. The
form is done using ColdFusion so I could do this if there isn’t
any other way. But I’d have to do some serious work to make sure
I had the correct ticket to twiddle with…

Suggestions?

Kent Hamilton KHamilton@Hunter.COM
Manager Systems Admin & Networking
Hunter Engineering Company

2

Have you looked at the command line interface instead of e-mail.

This would allow you to do what you want. I have only looked at this for a
second but an expect script would handle the process easily. Alternatively
you could play around with piping the responses to qt -create’s prompts.

Hint: run the following command
rt -create

Cheers
Adam Clarke----- Original Message -----
From: “Hamilton, Kent” KHamilton@Hunter.COM
To: rt-users@lists.fsck.com
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 10:22 AM
Subject: [rt-users] Question about using a web form to create a request.

I was building a web form which I had planned to use to simply
force people to enter specific information when they created a
request, since right now our “average” request consists of “My
PC is broke.”

I have the form built, do data validation on the info and am
all ready to generate an email to create the ticket, two of
the things I’d like to allow I don’t know if I can do.

  1. I want allow them to set a “Requested By” date and have
    that be the initial due date.
  2. I want to set the initial priority based on selections
    they make on the form.

So my question is: Since the ticket isn’t created yet, it
doesn’t look like I can use “%RT SET prio xx” in the new ticket
itself, so how can I set these short of twiddling the database
myself which I was trying to avoid by generating an email. The
form is done using ColdFusion so I could do this if there isn’t
any other way. But I’d have to do some serious work to make sure
I had the correct ticket to twiddle with…

Suggestions?

–
Kent Hamilton KHamilton@Hunter.COM
Manager Systems Admin & Networking
Hunter Engineering Company

rt-users mailing list
rt-users@lists.fsck.com
http://lists.fsck.com/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

3

Here’s another idea:

  • have your web-form use the rt-mailgate command with “extended-syntax”
    and the “-t” flag (which causes rt-mailgate to print the integer
    ticket number to STDOUT)

  • capture the ticket number output by rt-mailgate and then invoke
    rt-mailgate again with the desired %RT SET strings.

That should do it.

Have you looked at the command line interface instead of e-mail.

This would allow you to do what you want. I have only looked at this for a
second but an expect script would handle the process easily. Alternatively
you could play around with piping the responses to qt -create’s prompts.

Hint: run the following command
rt -create

Cheers
Adam Clarke

----- Original Message -----
From: “Hamilton, Kent” KHamilton@Hunter.COM
To: rt-users@lists.fsck.com
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 10:22 AM
Subject: [rt-users] Question about using a web form to create a request.

I was building a web form which I had planned to use to simply
force people to enter specific information when they created a
request, since right now our “average” request consists of “My
PC is broke.”

I have the form built, do data validation on the info and am
all ready to generate an email to create the ticket, two of
the things I’d like to allow I don’t know if I can do.

  1. I want allow them to set a “Requested By” date and have
    that be the initial due date.
  2. I want to set the initial priority based on selections
    they make on the form.

So my question is: Since the ticket isn’t created yet, it
doesn’t look like I can use “%RT SET prio xx” in the new ticket
itself, so how can I set these short of twiddling the database
myself which I was trying to avoid by generating an email. The
form is done using ColdFusion so I could do this if there isn’t
any other way. But I’d have to do some serious work to make sure
I had the correct ticket to twiddle with…

Suggestions?

–
Kent Hamilton KHamilton@Hunter.COM
Manager Systems Admin & Networking
Hunter Engineering Company

rt-users mailing list
rt-users@lists.fsck.com
http://lists.fsck.com/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

rt-users mailing list
rt-users@lists.fsck.com
http://lists.fsck.com/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

Happy Landings,

Jon Detert
Unix System Administrator, Milwaukee School of Engineering
1025 N. Broadway, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202

4

My understanding is that the best way is have the web invoke the
command line rt commands, as K. Hamer did in OncallForm.cgi (I think
that’s in the contrib area). Trying to do it through rt-mailgate
seems more difficult, as you would need an agent intercepting RT mail
and would have to filter out the tickets it didn’t care about.

In particular, Ken uses the rt -create command. This is an
interactive command that runs something like this:

$ ./rt -create
Welcome to Request Tracker 1.0.2
Place Request in queue:[testing]
Place Request in area:
Give request to:[ericg]
Requestor(s):[ericg@cats.ucsc.edu]
Starting Priority:
Final Priority:
Date due (MM/DD/YY):[2/10/01]
Please enter a detailed description of this request, terminated
by a line containing only a period:
[This is a test ticket creation.]
[.]

The brackets are not actually typed of course, they are just to
indicate that I entered that data. The above mentioned CGI just makes
a file containing the appropriate responses, and then invokes “rt
-create < responseFile”. He then filters the response with:

   if ( /^Request #(\d+) created/ ) {
     # A request was created
     $s_reqnum = $1;
   }

To get the request number and resolve the ticket if appropriate.
That’s seems like your best bet.

— Eric