[rt-users] Connecting RT to IBM iSeries and/or MSSQL databases?

[Martin Wheldon]

Hi Alex,

Sounds like you may be looking for the external custom fields 
functionality, please
see the link below for details:

https://docs.bestpractical.com/rt/4.4.1/extending/external_custom_fields.html

Best Regards

Martin

On 2016-10-10 15:15, Alex Hall wrote:
> Hello list,
> Another day, another proposed RT modification for me to investigate.
> Our company has six remote representatives who each have a few hundred
> customers they visit in person. The customer support team works
> locally, and is the group who actually enters all the tickets. We want
> reps to be able to look at tickets related to their customers, but we
> want to do that in a dashboard and not as a CC. Since each rep has
> hundreds of customers, and since the customer base for a rep can
> change a lot, saved searches aren't an ideal solution. It is also too
> error-prone and time-consuming to have staff enter a customer rep ID
> for every ticket, as they already have to enter an order number and
> other custom information. The good news is that, in databases we
> already have, the order number can lead from the order, to the
> customer, to the representative.
> 
> My thought is to have a cron job or a custom script that can take the
> order number, look up the rep on our iSeries or MSSQL databases, and
> fill in a custom field with the username of the relevant
> representative. I like the idea of a script, so that users can see the
> change immediately, but a cron job would probably be okay too. This
> would then let us use a saved search that just finds tickets where the
> rep name equals the name of the user whose dashboard it is, instead of
> having hundreds of 'or' statements trying to find all possible
> customer numbers.
> 
> * Can Perl code in scripts talk to an external database as I've
> described?
> 
> * Can the RT cron tool do this job? If so, what might the workflow
> look like? I haven't yet looked very deeply into this tool's abilities
> or syntax.
> 
> Thanks for any thoughts. Debian 8.6, RT4.2.8 (hopefully going to be
> 4.4 sometime soon), MySQL database for RT. No, the server doesn't yet
> have the drivers for these databases, but my question is about
> integrating the information into RT and not about how Debian talks to
> DB2 or Server.
> 
> --
> 
> Alex Hall
> Automatic Distributors, IT department
> ahall at autodist.com
> 
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