[Vtigercrm-developers] Tickets, mail converter and workflows

[Max Clarke]

Hi,

This isn't a question per se, but more of a general comment. Please let me
know if this isn't welcome on this list.

I figure since the developers monitor this list they may find this feedback
useful.

I've basically been setting up the Tickets module, utilising 2 built in
functions: a mailbox for email ticket creation through Mail Converter, and
the built in Workflows for emailing contacts when tickets are updated etc.
Seeing as how these 2 things are built in and have built in options for
these needs, I would assume this is a pretty standard setup.

The number of things I've had to fiddle with and fix to get this working is
crazy. I'm just going to list them here in case anyone else tries to get
this going or the developers want to fix this for future versions. In no
particular order:

* most of the standard ticket workflows have bogus rules in the "match all"
condition list that you have to delete to get them working. See 2nd
condition in the attached screenshot. This condition is in most of the
ticket workflows. Once I've deleted the bogus rules the workflows work.

* the built in emails need work.
    - There are sentences that don't make sense - "The Ticket is replied
the details are : <ticket details>".
    - In the subject there are 2 different ticket ID's - the ticket number
(TT01) and the ticket_id. Confusing.
    - The comments list in the email has no date or time for each comment,
nor who made the comment. Just the comment text. Again, very confusing.
    - All the ticket emails are the same. They always say "the ticket is
replied the details are" even on the ticket created one.

* the mail converter will only convert emails to tickets once per day,
because the last run date is just a date, not a datetime column. So even
though the cron runs every 15 mins and the scheduler says the mail
converter will run every 15 mins (and defaults to this), it will only
convert once per day. To get it to work as you'd expect (every 15 mins and
convert new emails since the last run), you have to replace the condition
in the core code of mail converter with "UNSEEN". This is documented
nowhere except an old forum post:
https://discussions.vtiger.com/index.php?p=/discussion/26140/cant-get-mail-scanner-to-work-after-new-release/p1

* the mail converter assigns everything to administrator. Even ticket
comments. So you have no way of knowing who's commenting on a ticket, and
no way of automatically assigning a ticket to a user. I've had to modify
core code to get this to be usable.

* you need to set up a cron job to get workflows working. And there are
many conflicting reports of how to set this up all over the documentation,
so this was a bit of a trial and error process.

There's more, this is just off the top of my head, but you get the idea.

I get that this is open source and so things won't work the way you might
expect. I'm happy to submit fixes for these, but I'm not sure what the
submission process is (the wiki only details how to submit new modules,
though no email or link is provided). Normally you can do a

Also, judging by the documentation it looks like this is all working in the
On Demand version, so I don't know if me submitting fixes will get ignored
until you guys are allowed to filter these working bits down from the on
demand release or what. How does that work anyway? Can we expect on demand
bug fixes and features in future or is it totally separate?

And finally, happy to submit a page for the wiki with steps to fix these in
the current 6.0.0 version, but it looks like the community can't update the
wiki from the page. Is this allowed, and if so how do I submit?

If the tone of this email is a little abraisive I apologise. It was just a
frustrating process to get this working as it's outlined in the
documentation.

Max
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