[rt-users] status change when reply on resolved ticket

[Ruslan Zakirov]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 11:04 AM, Tim Cutts <tjrc at sanger.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On 27 Aug 2012, at 23:04, Duncan McEwan <duncan at ecs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:
>
>> You can't have it both ways.  Either you disable the auto open scrip in
>> which case you potentially miss a customer responding to a resolved ticket
>> to say the problem is not fixed.  Or you leave the scrip enabled in which
>> case you may have to manually re-resolve tickets that are reopened due to
>> "Thank-you" emails.
>>
>> We do that latter and find it not that big a deal for our ticket volumes.
>> Your situation may well be different.
>>
>> I suppose you could try writing your own auto open scrip that searched
>> through the body of a reply to try to figure out whether it looked like it
>> was just saying "thank you".  Maybe someone has already put something like
>> this on the wiki.  If not, good luck getting something that works reliably...!
>>
>> The other suggestion that has been made on the list from time to time is
>> to have an "On resolve" scrip with a template that includes text along
>> the lines of "There is no need to reply to this message to thank us if
>> this issue is now resolved as that will just reopen this closed ticket".
>> But you'll still get some users doing it anyway...
>
> That's what we do too.  The problem is that it tends to mess with ticket resolution times, and that upsets the various managers who rely on dubious statistics like mean time to resolution for KPIs.
>
> It's not such a problem for the "thank you" emails, more for the breed of user who each time they have a problem think "who helped me last time?", look through their email, and reply to any old email that appears to have come from that person.  They often re-open tickets which are months or years old.  I'm considering writing a scrip which checks how long ago the ticket was resolved, and if it's longer than a certain threshold, leaves it closed and automatically creates a child ticket with the new transaction in it.  I think there are bits and pieces to do this in the wiki already, (ForkIntoNewTicket or something) but I haven't pieced all of it together yet.

Somebody did post such solution to the wiki and list years ago [1].

[1] http://requesttracker.wikia.com/wiki/ForkIntoNewTicket

I can not say if it will just work with RT 4.0 or not. It's quite
dirty solution as it rebuilds message from data in RT.

The other way around that is better way to go is to change how RT
finds ID of ticket when processes incoming emails. We have a change in
4.0.7 that allows you to implement it without patching RT.

There is a very simple ExtractTicketId function in
lib/RT/Interface/Email.pm. It recieves MIME::Entity object that
represents incomming email, fetches subject from email object and
calls ParseTicketId that finds a subject tag and returns id.
ExtractTicketId can be wrapped to change how RT finds id, where RT
finds it and any logic can be attached on top of it.

Instead of further describing how to do it and where to look I just
wrote and uploaded RT-Extension-RepliesToResolved-0.01.tar.gz that
does only one basic thing "creates a new ticket when email comes to
resolved ticket". It passes basic manual testing, but there are plenty
to do to make it more configurable and suitable for daily use.

It will be really soon on CPAN.

Next things to do:

* delete subject tag from the email

* put a header into mail with original id, for example X-RT-Was-Reply-To

* a scrip that uses X-RT-Was-Reply-To header to setup a link between
tickets or write a comment to one or both tickets describing what
happened

* config option to disable functionality if ticket was resolved less
that X days ago.

......

I'm not going to implement any of that in near future, but ok to merge
clean patches and release new versions.

Enjoy.

>
> Tim
>
> --
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-- 
Best regards, Ruslan.