[whups] Clients

[Bo Daley]

On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Chuck Hagenbuch wrote:

> I need a few people to speek up about what they actually use the clients
> functionality for in Whups. I started looking at how to rewrite it to use
> RelationshipManager, and ended up simply removing all references to clients
> from my local version. Looks much cleaner now. ;)

ok maybe I'd better speak up here as I'm probably responsible for the 
worst of the code in there ;). 

> - Do multiple clients really need to share the same queue? Even if they do, is
> this something that can be solved more cleanly with better queue permissions?

yes I have some queues (eg. 'Server Support') that have numerous clients 
attached to them. This doesn't seem so much like a permissions issue as a 
means of categorising tickets by 'project' or 'service'..

Then again for simplicity it's probably easier to attach clients to 
tickets instead of queues. (the current code attempts to do both). I'd be 
happy with the idea of ditching the queue->client relationships. There are 
other ways to categorise tickets in Whups.

> - What if queue attributes were extended to be both searchable and customizable,
> so you could custom-define a field that was added to all tickets in queue Foo to
> be a dropdown of clients? Or, a dropdown of ... kinds of tomatoes? Etc. Would be
> a decent amount of work, but potentially a far bigger payoff in terms of
> flexibility/functionality.

Yes I like this approach -- the client selector would then just be a 
Horde_Form element attached to the ticket. This would need to be 
integrated into the main ticket form (not hidden under the separate 
'Attributes' tab -- all the users I've tested with seem to forget to look 
in there).

> - Or does this really need to be in the core of Whups? If so, I say forget about
> relationshipmanager and add a db field for client_id.

That would make searches on clients much faster in Whups (no more having 
to filter results from the DataTree), but enough people seem to be using 
Whups without clients to warrant keeping this out of the core if 
possible...

> - What's needed (or desired) in terms of integration with Hermes? I'm not very
> familiar with where this is now. If you could link a ticket with a time entry
> in hermes, and custom fields (those queue attributes) could be linked in too,
> how would that be? Or maybe if you entered hours along with comments in Whups,
> and that generated an entry in Hermes automatically? Etc.

I'd agree that there should be a field available for entering time on the 
ticket comment form -- that way, any time anyone adds something to the 
ticket (even just a simple comment) they can enter how much time was spent 
on it. I guess the ideal place for this data is Hermes, so there'd need 
to be a means of linking a comment to a hermes timeslice.

The ticket page could then query hermes to keep a running total indicating 
how much time's gone into it. Whups could even provide reports on average 
time spent on tickets.

hope that helps,

bo.