[rt-users] Split Ticket

[Tony Aiuto]

On 01 Nov 2002 09:04:04 +0100, Dirk Pape <pape-rt at inf.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

>--On Dienstag, 29. Oktober 2002 9:55 Uhr Tony Aiuto <tony at ics.com> wrote:
>>I need a feature that will let me split a ticket into
>>N tickets.  ...  copy all the data from the original ticket
>>into the new tickets.  Then ... edit the subject and content
>>on each to divide the problems.  Ideally, if you ask to split
>>into 3 tickets, you should get 3 popup dialogs which present
>>the subject and text of the original so that you can edit them
>>down as a single process.

>[dirk]
>I would like to follow up with an extended szenario of this I have in mind:
>It would be nice, if you not only can split a ticket but "fork" it in the 
>following way:
>For a given ticket, have a button (or sth. equivalent) to create a number n 
>of child tickets on which the original ticket depends. This child tickets 
>might start wih the same data of the original ticket, but that should be 
>extendable.
>
>The original ticket will be set to stalled and the created tickets to new.


Yes.  I think that's useful as well.  Sometimes it's simply
independent requests in one ticket, and it's a split.
Other times it's a few related things that all must be completed
before the requestor is happy.

>If all of the created tickets are resolved, the original ticket's status 
>should automatically change to "open" again and so reappear in the list of 
>the owner, who can then decide whether it is resolved now or not.
>
>If some correspondance is added to one of the resolved child tickets not 
>only the child ticket should be reopened but also the original parent 
>ticket.

That sounds like it would work.

>As Stucki (stucki at math.fu-berlin.de) has written in another followup in 
>this thread, we could spend some time here to contribute to this issue, if 
>there were some hints, in which directions to go.
>My scenario do not only affect data-representation or -presentation but 
>buisiness logic, so I am not sure how to find the correct hooks for 
>patching.

As my original post said, I need this feature.  Some intial
replies pointed me at a Clone feature posted in the list
last year some time.   Thank you for that pointer, but it did
not really do what I needed, so I've been implementing it myself.

Here's where I am in the design/implementation

I've added an OnSplit condition.  This is important for me
because I want to send an email saying. "We split your
request into several parts.  This is the Ticket # for
this new part...".    This has deep interactions with
the transaction history.
	- we don't want a split to trigger an OnCreate condition.
	That would send the wrong mail in most cases.
	- I want the newly created tickets to have a
	create event in the history, otherwise all the
	places in the code which check for Create events
	have to check for Create or Split.  That ripple
	would be bad.
	- I would like the original ticket to have a
	transaction record which says 'Split into ticket M'
	and the new ticket to have one which says 'Split from
	ticket N".  The OnSplit event should only be fired
	from the context of the new ticket.
I'm playing with several ways to do this, none of which I'm
particularly happy with yet.   What I'm about to try
is adding new transaction types for Split & Fork, mostly
so that there are good markers in the history.

The question now is if there should be two distinct conditions
for Split/Fork, or if one suffices.  Either way, there is
probably something special about the condition, because a
split will cause a transaction in both the original and new
ticket histories.  I only want on condition to be triggered.
I welcome philosophical input on this issue.


Rather than popup-dialogs (as I said in my first post), I'm
building a Split.html page.   It will display the ticket
subject and the content of the creation transaction.
Below that it displays them again, as editable fields,
but labeled to indicate that they belong to the new ticket.

You change the subject and content as appropriate and press
submit.   You get the page again, but with the addition
of the split out ticket (non-editable) and the links to
the original or split ticket.   This should make it fairly
easy to to a bunch of splits in a row.

I think I could incorporate Dirk's suggestion on the
same page.  Instead of 'Submit' there would be separate
buttons for 'Split' and 'Fork'.

Any other ideas and suggestions would be welcome.

-tony