[rt-devel] Linking to external systems from RT

[Justin Hawkins]

Hi folks,

I'm wanting to provide as much linkage between our legacy systems
and RT as possible.

Fortunately, our existing system can be referenced via a single URL
with an object ID on the end. 

There are two places in RT I'd like to link to this system:

o Users
o Tickets

In Users the answer seems fairly obvious - the 'ExternalContactInfoId'
attribute. I'm curious though, this used to be 'exposed' in RT2, now
it's not editable from the GUI. This is trivial to add, but I wondered
if there was a reason it's currently hidden?

If not, I was thinking of a configuration directive, perhaps
ExternalContactInfoId_Link or similar, which could be a URL with a %%
placeholder for adding the reference. These links would be put in
appropriate places (probably clickable from the 'People' element).

For the second external system reference, on Tickets, I was thinking
it could be done fairly generically. By adding a column to
'CustomFields', (called, say ExternalLink), each custom field could be
linkable to an external system.

As an example, lets say you have a custom field called 'ClientID',
with an ExternalLink of 'http://intranet/clientinfo/%%/view'. When you
enter a value of '12364' into the field, it becomes a link to the URL
http://intranet/clientinfo/12364/view

Am I going over ground someone else has covered here?

	- Justin