Vincent J., Spier R., Rolsky D. RT Essentials / 3.4. Replying to (and Commenting on) a Ticket

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RT Essentials
Authors: Vincent J., Spier R., Rolsky D.
Published year: 2005
Pages: 36-39/166

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3.4. Replying to (and Commenting on) a Ticket

RT records two main types of transactions: attribute changes and correspondence. Correspondence and comments are what adds content to a ticket and covers all the replies and user feedback that RT collects. While you can change many different types of attributes, most of the interesting content in your RT installation will come from correspondence. Comments are generally intended as private or internal correspondence about a ticket. RT is very flexible and the exact mechanics will depend on how your administrator has configured RT, but usually correspondence is visible to end-users and comments are not.

You reply to a ticket by clicking the Reply link at the top right of the ticket display page or beside an individual item in the ticket's history. Figure 3-5 shows the form for responding to tickets. The same form creates either replies or comments, depending on what you select for Update Type. From this form, it's simple to reply to an end user, mark down how much time you spent composing your response, and close the ticket.

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3.5. Escalating a Ticket

Each ticket has a priority. Priority is a way to indicate relative importance. It can be any integer. Most organizations use the range 0-100. Every queue has a default priority for new tickets if you don't explicitly set one. To escalate the priority of a ticket, set the priority of a ticket to a higher number. The priority field is in the Basics category, shown in Figure 3-6.

Figure 3-5. Ticket reply

Figure 3-6. Ticket priority

Queues can be configured to automatically adjust the priority of tickets over time. Based on the current priority of the ticket, the priority escalates every day so that it reaches its final priority on a given due date. ^[*]

^[*] Your RT administrator needs to enable automatic escalation using rt-crontool.

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3.6. Assigning a Ticket

Tickets can have an owner—the user responsible for working on the ticket or for coordinating the work. To assign a ticket to someone, go to the People form from the ticket display page, and select the user from the Owner drop-down list, as shown in Figure 3-7. This list contains the usernames of all the users allowed to own tickets in the ticket's current queue.

Figure 3-7. Assigning a ticket

You can assign only tickets that you own or that are unowned. If you need to reassign a ticket that you do not own, you can steal the ticket and then assign it to someone else. Tickets you can steal will display a Steal link next to Reply and Comment in the upper right corner of the ticket display page. Not all users have access to steal tickets, see "ACL" in Chapter 8.

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3.7. Resolving a Ticket

When you are satisfied that the ticket you are working on is finished, you can change its status to resolved, so other users know it doesn't need any more work. This process is known as resolving the ticket. To modify a ticket's status, just click Resolve in the upper right hand corner of any ticket page, as shown in Figure 3-8.

The form used for resolving a ticket allows you to send a reply to the ticket's requestor and watchers.