[rt-devel] rt3 and custom fields

[Bart Bunting]

Hi all,

I've been on the list for a couple of months now, just listening to
the great progress being made on rt3.  I've just started to have a
play with rt3 prior to upgrading our rt2 instance.  

I've got a couple of questions:

I had hacked our copy of rt2 to add a site field which is simply an
integer denoting which customer site a given ticket belongs to.  A
couple of small elements added to the web UI look up the site ID in an
external database and allows the user to select a site when creating a
ticket as well as displaying the correct site name when viewing
tickets.

I'm a little confused as to how best to implement this with rt3.  It
seems obvious that a custom field is the answer, but I'm not sure how
I would hook in my logic for looking up the site name from the
external database.  

Another problem is that in addition to showing the site name, several
other details are looked up from the external database, such as
contact name and phone number.  

I guess the conclusion that I'm comeing to is what I want is a way to
use a custom field for the storage of the data but to be able to
render a custom UI element that does the database lookups and display.

Can someone give me a few pointers as to what they think is the best
aproach?

Any examples of something similar to look at would be fantastic!

Thanks in advance,

Bart