[rt-users] RT4.0.5 article creation- classes and topic nesting

[Albertson, William (Rancho Cordova)]

Howdy,

I haven't found a lot of information about creating articles under RT4.0.5 with nested topics.  I've recently installed this application, so I'm also not an expert.  I'm not sure if I would be better served by instead setting up a wiki, and then just linking article items instead.  Here is the problem:

I've created the class "Ops" for articles.  This is the name of our group of staff.  We are setting permissions for editing "Ops" related articles here.  Also, there are other groups to be considered- this installation isn't just for "Ops".  There will be other teams with their own articles. 

Next, I created a tree of topics.  Let's say "Systems" and "Networks".

Subtopics under "Systems" are "Hosts", and then other overview topics like "Backups".

Under "Hosts" are going to be articles containing host specific info, like a manifest article for backupsrv01, and another article for warranty information.

Then I get into article creation.  I created a couple of custom fields called "Body" [wikitext] "IP Address" [ip address] and "Attachment" [one upload].

The problem I run into is that RT doesn't seem to differentiate between different topic custom fields within a class's sub-topics.  I need to display IP address information for "hosts" articles, but don't need to see that field for an explanation on our backup system.  Am I putting the cart before the horse for managing different article formats?

It seems that the Articles feature of RT is limited to exactly one type of article format per class, regardless of how many sub-topics you have underneath that class.  From my testing, I would have to create a class for every single article format type that I wish to use (host manifest, host warranty, service overview would now all be classes), which wouldn't work well with having nested topics underneath.  Then, my users would have to search for general keywords, because now they would not be able to drill down nested topics easily for topic specific information.  Instead of drilling down through "Ops -> Systems -> Hosts -> Warranties", they would have to know to select the class "Warranties" to browse for host warranties, or know what keywords to search for.  The last two options aren't very desirable.

Classes make up the root of Article topic trees, but I can't customize articles in topic sub-trees.  That seems very wasteful, so I'm guessing that I'm missing something here.  I looked up templates, but that seems to be related to ticket fields (see, I'm an RT novice here, really).

As I've read what few docs there are for the RT4.0.5 Articles feature, I would appreciate a kind explanation on how article forms, custom fields and topic nesting are *intended* to work.  At this point, I'm not sure if I need to either completely change how I am structuring articles in RT, or I if I should instead install a wiki/dms and point topic related article related items to that as links.

 
William "Bill" Albertson


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