What happens if a lifecycle is edited to change a status' name?

RT Users
1

Hello everyone,

I’m curious what would happen to tickets if their lifecycle were edited. Let’s say we change “stalled” to “on hold”, but all actions and rights involving the “stalled” status remain the same. Would stalled tickets in queues to which the lifecycle applies get the newly-created status? If not, which status would they receive? Would I have to go in and update any rights involving the old status, or would rights continue to be applied to all the users and groups to which they applied before the change?

I have three custom lifecycles set up on RT at the moment. Someone is asking that I change the name of a status in one of them. I’m not quite sure what will happen if I do this. My suspicion is that RT will set stalled tickets to some default status, and that rights will be revoked. It doesn’t know that this new status replaces “stalled”, after all, so it wouldn’t assume that the new status serves the same purpose. If I’m right, though, what is the default status RT will choose for stalled tickets?

2

Hi Alex,
I think you’ll want to plan ahead before making this type of change. If you add or change a status that is not being used, hat new or modified will show in the tickets. If you have tickets that are in the status that you want to delete or modify, it will cause problems and leave them stranded…
Hope this helps.
Bob

3

Thanks. By “stranded”, do you just mean that tickets won’t show in searches/dashboards that rely on the status? That is, if someone shows all active tickets in a queue, tickets using the old, defunct status would still appear, right? Our RT is currently only used for internal issue tracking, so we don’t tend to have huge amounts of active tickets in any one queue. Department staff should be able to fix tickets that have an invalid status. I just didn’t know if making a change like this would cause errors, automatically select some default status, or do something else.

4

Yes they will probably not show in searches and dashboard you already have created. You’ll need to create another search looking for that old status but because it is not part of the lifecycle, you will not be able to change to anything. I think your best bet is to create the new status and move the one you want to change to that status before deleting it.

5

Thank you. I hadn’t considered that the old status couldn’t change because no transitions would be defined for it.