[rt-users] RT4.0.5 article creation- classes and topic nesting

[Kevin Falcone]

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 07:31:08PM -0400, Albertson, William (Rancho Cordova) wrote:
> Then I get into article creation. I created a couple of custom fields
> called "Body" [wikitext] "IP Address" [ip address] and "Attachment"
> [one upload].
> 
> The problem I run into is that RT doesn't seem to differentiate
> between different topic custom fields within a class's sub-topics. I
> need to display IP address information for "hosts" articles, but don't
> need to see that field for an explanation on our backup system. Am I
> putting the cart before the horse for managing different article
> formats?

Custom Fields are assigned per-class, not per topic.

> It seems that the Articles feature of RT is limited to exactly one
> type of article format per class, regardless of how many sub-topics

I'm not sure what you mean by "Article Format".

> you have underneath that class. From my testing, I would have to
> create a class for every single article format type that I wish to use
> (host manifest, host warranty, service overview would now all be
> classes), which wouldn't work well with having nested topics
> underneath. Then, my users would have to search for general keywords,
> because now they would not be able to drill down nested topics easily
> for topic specific information. Instead of drilling down through "Ops
> -> Systems -> Hosts -> Warranties", they would have to know to select
> the class "Warranties" to browse for host warranties, or know what
> keywords to search for. The last two options aren't very desirable.

There are global topics.  It sounds like you want several classes and
global topics applied across the classes.

> Classes make up the root of Article topic trees, but I can't customize
> articles in topic sub-trees. That seems very wasteful, so I'm guessing
> that I'm missing something here. I looked up templates, but that seems
> to be related to ticket fields (see, I'm an RT novice here, really).
> 
> As I've read what few docs there are for the RT4.0.5 Articles feature,
> I would appreciate a kind explanation on how article forms, custom
> fields and topic nesting are *intended* to work. At this point, I'm
> not sure if I need to either completely change how I am structuring
> articles in RT, or I if I should instead install a wiki/dms and point
> topic related article related items to that as links.

Have you read the included article introduction docs?

-kevin
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