RT - NEW tagging option for tickets

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 06:22:33 -0500
bsg, rt

Whether it's a blog, a wiki, or even Twitter, when you have a system with a lot of information, some method of tagging that information with easy-to-remember words or phrases makes it much easier to find. RT (Request Tracker) already provides a large amount of metadata to categorize and find tickets including the queue they are in, various dates associated with ticket activity, status, and content like the subject and correspondence. But often you want some way to categorize tickets within a queue into sensible groups.

You can add custom fields to track well-defined attributes and many users add multiple fields to fully describe and categorize tickets. But in some cases a defined drop down list may not be flexible enough. You can allow free-form entry, but that can result in many different variations on what are really the same value, like bug, bugs, issue, and defect all to categorize a bug ticket.

BestPractical, our RT vendor, has released a new extension for tagging which DoIT has applied. This new extension will provide a simple tagging mechanism that solves both issues. It provides free-form entry, but with autocomplete so as you start typing you can see similar values that may already exist. If you do need a new value, just type it in and RT will recognize that it's new and add it to the list so other users will now see it via autocomplete in the future. And once the values are added, they become links making them available for search and reporting.

Please note that tags are only available to support staff for the queue. It is an optional entry but if you do chose to add a tag it is delimited by a space. For example CamelCase would be a single tag whereas Camel Case would be considered two tags. Below is an example of tags being added to a ticket.

For your convenience I am including the faq's already in place for RT below.

https://wiki.umbc.edu/display/faq/RT+for+Support+Staff

Please contact me if you have any questions or suggestions.

Joe Kirby

AVP DoIT Business Systems