[rt-users] Forking a new ticket from a correspondance

[Bruce Campbell]

On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, Sebastian Flothow wrote:

> At 10:24 Uhr -0800 5.4.2002, bill at daze.net wrote:
> >It would be nice if there was a status type "closed" (for lack of a better
> >example) that would automatically force correspondence referencing the
> >closed ticket to a brand new ticket and not touch the old one.  Status
> >like "resolved" would still work as they do now, i.e. reopen the existing
> >ticket.
>
> I don't think this would work, since the user might actually supply
> information related to the old ticket. And how would you decide
> whether to "close" or to "resolve" a ticket?

Thinking about it (its ~2am atm, so this takes a bit for me right now),
its actually a simple time-based problem.

If a ticket is resolved, and new correspondence comes in on that ticket,
you have two possibilities on what the requestor intends.  Firstly, if the
correspondence comes in within a short time of it being resolve, then its
most likely to be related to the original correspondence.

The other possibility is if the correspondence comes in a good time after
the ticket was resolve, in which case the likelihood is that the requestor
has simply replied to an old mail with a new issue.

This time-based behaviour would be easy to code up, however the 2.0.x
series of RT does make it slightly difficult to create a new ticket
transparently to the user *and* avoid adding correspondence on the
original ticket (if applicable as described above).

RT, The Next Generation, looks to have the possibility of Scrips being
executed before the ticket id is assigned (hrm, Scrips assigning the
ticket id), so this behaviour would be even easier to implement.

When you come down to it however, it is a user education issue of ensuring
that the lesson of 'Do not reply to old issues with new ones, as the
tracking system will hate you' is rammed into their minds sufficiently.

-- 
                             Bruce Campbell                            RIPE
                   Systems/Network Engineer                             NCC
                 www.ripe.net - PGP562C8B1B                      Operations