[whups] Clients

[mbydalek at mobilemini.com]

Just for reference, I am approaching this more as a Help Desk / Trouble
Ticket system, as that is how I modified Whups back in June/July.  Chuck
asked to see some code, and I just didn't have the time back then to present
it in a way that made sense and since then I have forgotton about it.  With
that being said, here are my thoughts ...

> On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Chuck Hagenbuch wrote:
> 
> > - 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.

I agree with Bo on this.  For my setup, I actually have 894 "clients" that
have access to 12 different queues I have.

> 
> 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.

This was the first thing I changed back in June/July to make queue
management more manageable.  Also, there was a ton of time to lookup clients
each time a queue was referenced, so any queue->client code was removed.
What I'm doing now is attaching clients the tickets using their Turba ID,
and then just doing a lookup on that ID to get their information.

> > - 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).

I think that the queue attributes idea is great as it would allow queues to
be fully customizable based on the situation that Whups is being utilized
for.  The dropdown of client imo is probably not a good way to do it because
of potential situations where someone would have a lot of clients.  An
alternative to choose clients could be a pop-up (like IMP's addressbook)
with a way to easily select All Clients.  The better way would be to have
the option of selecting clients, or toggle something to just say "Any
Client" in the system.

> > - 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...

Personally, this would be great as client lookups is the one area that takes
the most time.

Mike Bydalek