[rt-users] RT to go? Dependency graphs?

[Matt Disney]

Johan,

I've got nothing on number 1. 

For number 2, however, you may be interested in looking at the DTRT
stuff in the contrib/rt-addons area. More specifically:
http://www.fsck.com/pub/rt/contrib/2.0/rt-addons/DTRT .  This is some
work Jesse has done on a project management interface/extension to
RT2.  Although it's not exactly what you're looking for, I've used it
as a great starting point to build an interface that lists all the
requests in a queue that are of "type" 'project' (as opposed to
'ticket') and then show the children of each of those 'project'
requests. Jesse already has the part done to display one at a time, I
just had to modify it a little bit to get exactly what I want.

However, there isn't any act-or-restrict-based-on-dependency
functionality in RT2.0, as far as I know. So, you may be able to view
your dependencies for a ticket in hierarchical fashion, but without
extending RT2.0 you won't be able to say "don't resolve a ticket
dependent on another unless the depended-upon ticket is also resolved"
or anything like that. But, if your group is relatively good at
following business rules, that may not be an issue.

Jesse has said that RT2.2 will have some workflow enhancements.  It may
be that RT2.2 will have exactly what you're looking for, but I'm not
sure about that.

Let me know if any of this doesn't make sense or if you would like
additional information on my experiences playing around with DTRT and
so forth. And my apologies in advance if I've misrepresented anyone or
anything in this email. :-)

Matt

Ihren writes:
>Hi,
>
>I'm a long time Req user from a previous life (including implementing
>my own multi-queue extensions and whatnots) but I have not used RT2
>before. RT looks very nice (especially to someone with too much
>exposure to Req internals, shudder).
>
>However, I do have two questions for non-standard use that would be
>extremely useful to me/us.
>
>1. We are not a typical helpdesk. Instead we have a mix of internal
>   issues, tech development, planning *and* customer promblems. And I
>   want to funnel it all into RT.
>
>   To make things worse, we are not always in one place. We travel, we
>   lose Internet connectivity (typically in hotel rooms, airports,
>   etc). At the same time such (disconnected) occasions are often the
>   best to get things off your personal list of things to do.
>
>   So what I would like to do is run RT on top of a replicated MySQL
>   db with slave replicas in our laptops. I fully realize that I
>   should restrict myself to read-only access to the replica, and any
>   writes while disconnected had better be done via an email-updater
>   (possibly enhanced-mailgate that I found in the contrib area).
>
>   Is this idea a strong indication of someone either finally going
>   bonkers or at least trying to fit a square nail into a triangular
>   hole? Or would it be possible to make this work in a reasonable
>   fashion? Anyone tried anything like that?
>
>2. Many tickets in my environment have a tendency of forking new
>   "sub-tickets". I.e. the original issue stalls on identified
>   subproblems and the dependency fields seem great to express this.
>
>   However, I have not found any functionality to get an overview of
>   the resulting dependency graph. This is the type of functionality
>   that is traditionally found in project management systems, and I
>   agree that it is possibly a little bit out of the main stream
>   trouble ticket business.
>
>   But it would be incredibly useful for people like me that have very
>   convoluted dependencies and a need both to keep track of this for
>   oneself and to communicate the dependencies to others, preferably
>   visually.
>
>   It would be possible to implement this outside of RT, just working
>   from the raw MySQL data, but I think it would be much nicer to have
>   it within the RT framework. Has anyone seen any tools doing
>   anything like this anywhere close to RT?
>
>Regards,
>
>Johan Ihrén
>Autonomica
>
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