RTx::EmailCompletion adding name/other fields to pop down display

RT Users
1

Hi all,
we’ve been using RTx::EmailCompletion for a while very successfully.
This is an extension that allows the user to see a pop down display of
e-mail addresses upon insertion of a minimum number of characters.

The search is made on a number of parameters you can specify (in our
case, e-mail and cn from our directory). However, only the e-mail
address is displayed, whereas we would like to show something more,
let’s say part of the cn or other data.

Has anyone done something similar?

I’ve found on the cpan page that the customisation can be done in

  • html/NoAuth/js/emailcompletion.js
  • lib/RTx/EmailCompletion.pm

but it’s not totally clear to me how - I’m not too much into JS. Can
anyone help?

Cheers,
||

Giuseppe Sollazzo
Senior Systems Analyst
Computing Services
Information Services
St. George’s, University Of London
Cranmer Terrace
London SW17 0RE

Email: gsollazz@sgul.ac.uk
Direct Dial: +44 20 8725 5160
Fax: +44 20 8725 3583

2

Hi all,
we’ve been using RTx::EmailCompletion for a while very successfully. This
is an extension that allows the user to see a pop down display of e-mail
addresses upon insertion of a minimum number of characters.

The search is made on a number of parameters you can specify (in our case,
e-mail and cn from our directory). However, only the e-mail address is
displayed, whereas we would like to show something more, let’s say part of
the cn or other data.

Has anyone done something similar?

I’ve found on the cpan page that the customisation can be done in

  • html/NoAuth/js/emailcompletion.js
  • lib/RTx/EmailCompletion.pm

but it’s not totally clear to me how - I’m not too much into JS. Can anyone
help?

Cheers,
||

Unfortunately my Javascript skills are non-existent, but I would
like this as well. It would be great if it could display a number
of fields from the directory service to help you select the correct
Email address. For example, we also include phone extension/number
as a search key but we often need more information to validate the
customer.

Regards,
Ken

3

Hi all,
we’ve been using RTx::EmailCompletion for a while very successfully. This
is an extension that allows the user to see a pop down display of e-mail
addresses upon insertion of a minimum number of characters.

The search is made on a number of parameters you can specify (in our case,
e-mail and cn from our directory). However, only the e-mail address is
displayed, whereas we would like to show something more, let’s say part of
the cn or other data.

Has anyone done something similar?

I’ve found on the cpan page that the customisation can be done in

  • html/NoAuth/js/emailcompletion.js
  • lib/RTx/EmailCompletion.pm

Unfortunately my Javascript skills are non-existent, but I would
like this as well. It would be great if it could display a number
of fields from the directory service to help you select the correct
Email address. For example, we also include phone extension/number
as a search key but we often need more information to validate the
customer.

It shouldn’t actually require any JS hacking (or didn’t when I last
overrode this extension to do it).

You have to hack search in the .pm to return extra data about the user
and the EmailCompletion mason template to print it out.

Be aware that RT considers some data to be sensitive (such as phone
numbers) so it’ll refuse to show it unless you mark it as accessible.

In 4.0, this becomes ‘write a custom ShowUser option’ which isn’t
as flexible as I’d like it to be, but is a step forward.

-kevin

4

It shouldn’t actually require any JS hacking (or didn’t when I last
overrode this extension to do it).

Hi Kevin,
thanks - I’ll give it a look.

You have to hack search in the .pm to return extra data about the user
and the EmailCompletion mason template to print it out.

Be aware that RT considers some data to be sensitive (such as phone
numbers) so it’ll refuse to show it unless you mark it as accessible.
Uhm… how do you mean “mark”?

In 4.0, this becomes ‘write a custom ShowUser option’ which isn’t
as flexible as I’d like it to be, but is a step forward.

I’ll check it out - however we’ll stay for 3.8 for a while I guess, but
I’ll start getting documentation about how to migrate.

Thanks,
Giuseppe

Giuseppe Sollazzo
Senior Systems Analyst
Computing Services
Information Services
St. George’s, University Of London
Cranmer Terrace
London SW17 0RE

Email: gsollazz@sgul.ac.uk
Direct Dial: +44 20 8725 5160
Fax: +44 20 8725 3583

5

It shouldn’t actually require any JS hacking (or didn’t when I last
overrode this extension to do it).

Hi Kevin,
thanks - I’ll give it a look.

You have to hack search in the .pm to return extra data about the user
and the EmailCompletion mason template to print it out.

Be aware that RT considers some data to be sensitive (such as phone
numbers) so it’ll refuse to show it unless you mark it as accessible.
Uhm… how do you mean “mark”?

Check the methods in User/User_Overlay named *Accessible to get an
idea, there should be docs there and in DBIx::SearchBuilder about what
is going on. You’ll need a LocalAccessible to declare some fields
‘non admin’.

6

Hi Kevin, hi all.

After a couple of tries I’ve realised that despite maybe not being the
most elegant way of doing it, this can be done by modifying
/opt/rt3/local/plugins/RTx-EmailCompletion/lib/RTx/EmailCompletion/Ldap.pm.
However I seem to have a “strange” issue.

One step at a time. Where it does
my @emails = map { $_->get_attribute( $RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow
) } $mesg->entries;
which of course gives for granted $RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow to be
constituted of one element only,

replace with something like
my @emails = ();
foreach $entry ($mesg->entries) {
my $outstring = ‘’;
foreach $attribute ($RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow) {
$outstring=$outstring . $entry->get_attribute($attribute);
}
@emails{$_} = $outstring;
}
which basically creates the same output, but after concatenating the
result of all the attributes. So, for example, rather than having a map
constituted by only e-mail addresses, it will be e-mail addresses + name.

Now, this should work but I have a preliminary problem.

You will remember that the search and show variables are configured in
RT_SiteConfig.pm. In my case:
Set($EmailCompletionLdapAttrSearch, [qw/mail cn/]);
Set($EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow, [qw/mail cn/]);

I’ve verified that albeit the search being executed over “mail” and
“cn”, the “show” is ignored. As a debug, I’ve added file logging to
/opt/rt3/local/plugins/RTx-EmailCompletion/lib/RTx/EmailCompletion.pm.
To my understanding, this is the primary “hook” in RT for
EmailCompletion, and it’s the one that calls Ldap.pm->search_ldap.

Guess what? If I put a debug print (Dumper) in EmailCompletion.pm to
show the content of the two variables, I get:
This is the dump of EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow = ‘cn’;

This is the dump of EmailCompletionLdapAttrSearch = [
‘mail’,
‘cn’
];

Do you know why does it happen? I’m assuming I’ve overlooked
something… but can’t tell what.

Thanks,
Giuseppe

PS: Of course, I’ve tried different variable names and numbers, and it’s
always the very first in EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow that gets picked,
which rules out a default value (that would be ‘mail’, anyway).On 25/02/11 16:45, Kevin Falcone wrote:

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 04:37:32PM +0000, Giuseppe Sollazzo wrote:

On 25/02/11 15:28, Kevin Falcone wrote:

It shouldn’t actually require any JS hacking (or didn’t when I last
overrode this extension to do it).

Hi Kevin,
thanks - I’ll give it a look.

You have to hack search in the .pm to return extra data about the user
and the EmailCompletion mason template to print it out.

Be aware that RT considers some data to be sensitive (such as phone
numbers) so it’ll refuse to show it unless you mark it as accessible.
Uhm… how do you mean “mark”?
Check the methods in User/User_Overlay named *Accessible to get an
idea, there should be docs there and in DBIx::SearchBuilder about what
is going on. You’ll need a LocalAccessible to declare some fields
‘non admin’.

In 4.0, this becomes ‘write a custom ShowUser option’ which isn’t
as flexible as I’d like it to be, but is a step forward.
I’ll check it out - however we’ll stay for 3.8 for a while I guess,
but I’ll start getting documentation about how to migrate.

Giuseppe Sollazzo
Senior Systems Analyst
Computing Services
Information Services
St. George’s, University Of London
Cranmer Terrace
London SW17 0RE

Email: gsollazz@sgul.ac.uk
Direct Dial: +44 20 8725 5160
Fax: +44 20 8725 3583

7

Hi all,
I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to do this, but I’m not a Perl
programmer so what I managed to do is the following, in case anyone is
interested:

  1. In ./etc/RT_SiteConfig.pm set up EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow as a
    list rather than a single value
    Set($EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow, [qw/cn mail/]);

  2. In
    ./local/plugins/RTx-EmailCompletion/html/SelfService/Ajax/EmailCompletion comment
    out the line that picks only the first value from
    $EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow so that the whole array is passed

$RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow =

$RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow->[0] if
ref($RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow) eq “ARRAY”;

  1. In
    ./local/plugins/RTx-EmailCompletion/lib/RTx/EmailCompletion/Ldap.pm
    modify the call that gets the attribute value from ldap in order to
    obtain multiple values. That is, from:
    my @emails = map { $->get_attribute( $RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow )
    } $mesg->entries;
    to something like (pardon my horrible Perl :P)
    my @atts = map { "$    " } @{ $RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow };
    my @emails = ();
    foreach $entry ($mesg->entries) {
    $outstring=‘’;
    foreach $attribute (@atts) {
    $outstring= $outstring . " - " .
    $entry->get_attribute($attribute)->[0]; #or pass it to a formatting function
    }
    push(@emails, $outstring);
    }

Any comment or questions are welcome!

Best regards,
GiuseppeOn 02/03/11 17:00, Giuseppe Sollazzo wrote:

Hi Kevin, hi all.

After a couple of tries I’ve realised that despite maybe not being the
most elegant way of doing it, this can be done by modifying
/opt/rt3/local/plugins/RTx-EmailCompletion/lib/RTx/EmailCompletion/Ldap.pm.
However I seem to have a “strange” issue.

One step at a time. Where it does
my @emails = map { $_->get_attribute(
$RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow ) } $mesg->entries;
which of course gives for granted $RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow to
be constituted of one element only,

replace with something like
my @emails = ();
foreach $entry ($mesg->entries) {
my $outstring = ‘’;
foreach $attribute ($RT::EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow) {
$outstring=$outstring . $entry->get_attribute($attribute);
}
@emails{$_} = $outstring;
}
which basically creates the same output, but after concatenating the
result of all the attributes. So, for example, rather than having a
map constituted by only e-mail addresses, it will be e-mail addresses

  • name.

Now, this should work but I have a preliminary problem.

You will remember that the search and show variables are configured in
RT_SiteConfig.pm. In my case:
Set($EmailCompletionLdapAttrSearch, [qw/mail cn/]);
Set($EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow, [qw/mail cn/]);

I’ve verified that albeit the search being executed over “mail” and
“cn”, the “show” is ignored. As a debug, I’ve added file logging to
/opt/rt3/local/plugins/RTx-EmailCompletion/lib/RTx/EmailCompletion.pm.
To my understanding, this is the primary “hook” in RT for
EmailCompletion, and it’s the one that calls Ldap.pm->search_ldap.

Guess what? If I put a debug print (Dumper) in EmailCompletion.pm to
show the content of the two variables, I get:
This is the dump of EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow = ‘cn’;

This is the dump of EmailCompletionLdapAttrSearch = [
‘mail’,
‘cn’
];

Do you know why does it happen? I’m assuming I’ve overlooked
something… but can’t tell what.

Thanks,
Giuseppe

PS: Of course, I’ve tried different variable names and numbers, and
it’s always the very first in EmailCompletionLdapAttrShow that gets
picked, which rules out a default value (that would be ‘mail’, anyway).

On 25/02/11 16:45, Kevin Falcone wrote:

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 04:37:32PM +0000, Giuseppe Sollazzo wrote:

On 25/02/11 15:28, Kevin Falcone wrote:

It shouldn’t actually require any JS hacking (or didn’t when I last
overrode this extension to do it).

Hi Kevin,
thanks - I’ll give it a look.

You have to hack search in the .pm to return extra data about the user
and the EmailCompletion mason template to print it out.

Be aware that RT considers some data to be sensitive (such as phone
numbers) so it’ll refuse to show it unless you mark it as accessible.
Uhm… how do you mean “mark”?
Check the methods in User/User_Overlay named *Accessible to get an
idea, there should be docs there and in DBIx::SearchBuilder about what
is going on. You’ll need a LocalAccessible to declare some fields
‘non admin’.

In 4.0, this becomes ‘write a custom ShowUser option’ which isn’t
as flexible as I’d like it to be, but is a step forward.
I’ll check it out - however we’ll stay for 3.8 for a while I guess,
but I’ll start getting documentation about how to migrate.

–

Giuseppe Sollazzo
Senior Systems Analyst
Computing Services
Information Services
St. George’s, University Of London
Cranmer Terrace
London SW17 0RE

Email:gsollazz@sgul.ac.uk
Direct Dial: +44 20 8725 5160
Fax: +44 20 8725 3583

Giuseppe Sollazzo
Senior Systems Analyst
Computing Services
Information Services
St. George’s, University Of London
Cranmer Terrace
London SW17 0RE

Email: gsollazz@sgul.ac.uk
Direct Dial: +44 20 8725 5160
Fax: +44 20 8725 3583