Followups from closed tickets seem to disappear

[nextgear]

This is also filed in the bugtracker as http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-761?page=all, but the answer we got is very vague.

When you reply to a ticket and close it, follow-ups will not show up in the Overview. Expected would be to see the ticket show up under either Assigned (when assigned to a user) or Available tickets.

This is a major issue, because we're missing a lot of our client communications at the moment, which is simply unacceptable.

Is there any short-term solution to this problem?

[Hildy]

According to your reproduction instructions in the bug report:
"Mail to the helpdesk, reply this message closing the ticket, then reply to that message again."

You (the worker) close the ticket. You (the worker) reply to the closed ticket. That reply will be sent to the requesters, but it will not reopen the ticket. If you meant to say something else, can you please clarify your scenario, with example e-mail addresses for each step?

[nextgear]

If you meant to say something else, can you please clarify your scenario, with example e-mail addresses for each step?

Sorry I left this bit unclear, this is the situation:


customer@example.com creates a ticket by mailing helpdesk@ourcorp.com (cerberus)
Worker replies with a message from within cerberus, closing the ticket
customer@example.com replies to this ticket by mailing back (to helpdesk@ourcorp.com / cerberus)


At this stage the ticket doesn't show up in any of the Cerberus groups in the Overview. It however did in the 4.0-RC1 installation.

If you search for the ticket ID manually for "customer@example.com" (also searching in closed tickets), the customer reply can be found, but the ticket state is still "closed".

[Hildy]

Okay, nextgear, that sounds *really* odd. :-) (Just like when a doctor says that, it's not a good thing...)

My initial thought was that it was a worker, and that still seems like the most likely scenario, is that the "customer@example.com" email address is one that's assigned to a worker. If the helpdesk thinks the reply came from a Worker, it won't change the status of the ticket. You can check what worker addresses are known by Cerberus by looking in the `address_to_worker` table (and joining it to `address` to get the email address).

[nextgear]

My initial thought was that it was a worker, and that still seems like the most likely scenario, is that the "customer@example.com" email address is one that's assigned to a worker.

This scenario seems right, testing with a few other addresses the tickets show up just fine. I will do further investigations with the colleague that reported the issue to see if it still exists.

[stephenb]

We just had this situation arise. One of our workers sent in a ticket, i responded and closed the ticket, he responded and i never saw the response until he told me in person. Sure enough, the ticket was still closed with his response. Is there a way to allow e-mails sent from workers to reopen the tickets?

[joegeck]

It sounds like all these problems are tied into the situation Hildy described, where the "outside" address mailing into the Helpdesk is assigned to a Worker in your Helpdesk. As of right now, you will see some odd behavior and it is recommended to avoid this situation if possible. However there is an ongoing effort to fix this problem in a future release which you can read about on the blog (read behavior #3 and the comments section).

http://www.cerb4.com/blog/2008/09/16/three-cerb4-behaviors-that-make-you-think-its-broken/

[stephenb]

Thanks for the response Joe.

Can you expound on one of your comments from that blog post?
If you’ve read his comment he is in the exact same situation as you, basically where 2 companies want to use 1 Helpdesk. As I said in my comment that breaks the current design in that you are basically treating your workers as “customers”, by letting them e-mail into the Helpdesk from the outside.

Here is our situation. We have one organization with different departments that all decided that they could use the helpdesk after they saw it in use. So i set up each department as a group and limited their permissions to their respective group. This means that each worker would be a customer in the groups they don't have permission for. Is this outside what CHD was built for? Would it have been better for me to have a separate install for each department?

Thanks for the help.

[joegeck]

Thanks for the response Joe.

Can you expound on one of your comments from that blog post?


Here is our situation. We have one organization with different departments that all decided that they could use the helpdesk after they saw it in use. So i set up each department as a group and limited their permissions to their respective group. This means that each worker would be a customer in the groups they don't have permission for. Is this outside what CHD was built for? Would it have been better for me to have a separate install for each department?

Thanks for the help.

Good question since it is a tad confusing (it's even difficult for me to wrap my head around sometimes). I was attempting to shed some light on exactly why this role-reversal behavior was rearing its ugly head more than it should. When you have workers using the Helpdesk from both perspectives (inbound/outbound, employee/customer), the Helpdesk currently gets confused. In your situation that is a more than common use of the Helpdesk which is why this problem comes up so much, and why I chose to write a short explanation.

I'd hate to make it a true black or white type issue and say "yeah you really should have more than one Helpdesk", because that isn't a realistic expectation on our part for our users to have to deploy multiple desks. Ideally of course it would alleviate this problem, but it's not the ideal solution our developers are interested in. As you can see behavior #3 generates quite a bit of controversy, with most users convinced it's a bug instead. Our developers tend to agree with that sentiment and are moving to completely REMOVE this "bug" as soon as possible.

In one of the next major releases CHD-570/CHD-617 should no longer be a problem. That is a worker assigned address will NOT be treated any differently than an outside "customer" address. At that point that design statement I made will become moot. So keep an eye out for the fix and you won't have to worry if you use multiple companies/departments in one Helpdesk.

[stephenb]

Sounds good. Thanks for the help, Joe.