[rt-users] are Attachment records necessary?

[rt at mas.ml1.net]

Hi all,

I'm writing a quick script to import tickets from an Excel spreadsheet
into RT 3.0.6, based on a couple of things I've found in the contrib
directories, and I have a couple of questions.

First, some background:

We've needed to start using RT already, so I've bumped up the MySQL
auto_increment starting number to 1000, and I'm going to insert the old
tickets from the spreadsheet at numbers below that. Hence, I don't think
I can use either the RT CLI (couldn't get it to work anyway) or any of
the RT:: classes to create my tickets, because they'll just use the
auto_increment id provided by MySQL. So I'm going directly to the
database, and I want to make sure I'm doing the operations right to
preserve the db integrity.

The specific question I have is about Transactions and Attachments.

As I understand it, each time I add a row to Tickets I should also add a
row to Transactions of type='Create' to record the creation of the
Ticket. But do I need to add an entry to Attachments as well, or is that
optional? 

My current guess is that it's optional depending on whether there is any
descriptive content for the ticket (if so, put it in an attachment; if
not, you don't need an attachment). Is that right? Or should I be adding
an attachment for each Ticket regardless of whether there's any
description?

A related question is regarding the Headers field in the Attachments
table. Is it relied on for anything, or is it just for reference?

Thanks for your help.

michael