Support

Akeeba Ticket System

#28050 show all tickets to staff regardless of state or category

Posted in ‘Akeeba Ticket System for Joomla! 4 & 5’
This is a public ticket

Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
n/a
Akeeba Ticket System version
n/a

Latest post by on Thursday, 03 August 2017 17:17 CDT

hyperx
 Is there a way to show all the tickets in a single view?
Would it be possible to link from tickets info module to the Open Tickets / Pending Tickets / Closed Tickets?

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
That would be an impossibly long list where finding anything is almost impossible. That's why we preferred to implement per-category, per-user and Open status lists instead. What is the use case you have in mind? I am pretty sure that if we discuss what you want to do we can find an easier way than listing all tickets.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

hyperx
Because we have a lot of different categories and sometimes i just want to know what the pending Tickets are and what the latest reply was without having to search through all the categories.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Is there a reason why you don't want to do that from the back-end of the site? Creating such a feature in the site's front-end has side-effects in routing which we'd rather not have to work around.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

hyperx
Yes, because i will have multiple staff members who i want to be able to see this, but i don't want them to have acces to the backend.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
After looking a little bit into this, there is an obvious issue: access control and its performance impact.

By showing tickets per category we only have to do access filtering once. If you have access to the category you can, by definition, see its tickets.

If you need to list all tickets, however, things are more complicated. You can not just show a list of all tickets and simply display a 403 Access Forbidden error when someone clicks on a ticket they are not allowed to view. This could leak confidential information ranging from who filed a ticket in which category and when to privileged information which may be visible in the ticket's title.

Solving this requires fetching a list of all possible categories and seeing if the current user has access to each one of them separately. Based on that we need to create a list of allowed categories and use it to generate the ticket list.

However, even that is not enough. A user may be a manager of Category A but have only public ticket view access on Category B. At best we can sort categories in two groups, full access and limited access. This means that we now need to run two queries to get all tickets and join their results.

Despite the MASSIVE performance impact this is still not a good solution because the tickets are no longer globally sorted modification date descending. First you'd see all the tickets from the full access categories, then you'd see the tickets from the limited access categories. Merging these outputs is not possible. Instead, we'd have to load ALL tickets in memory and use PHP to decide which to show. That works great with a few dozen tickets but when you hit around 1000 tickets you'll run out of PHP memory.

There are two ways to avoid these performance show-stoppers.

One way is to display tickets only from categories the user has Support Staff access, just like we do with Latest Open Tickets. However, this is not what you want (a list of all replied tickets).

Thus we are left with the second option, make this feature available only to users with the global, component-wide Support Staff privilege. However, that's the same as creating a new user group with backend access that has Manage access only for Akeeba Ticket System and no other create/edit/delete privileges. A user in that group would be able to log into the backend and use the backend Tickets page to see exactly what you want.

So, after all, what you want to do would either fail or would be equivalent to giving targeted backend access only to ATS and only for listing information. As a result there is no compelling reason to create a duplicate front-end feature. After all, the people who would have had access to this feature are the same people who have full access to ATS anyway.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

hyperx
The Support Staff has full access to all Categories, but i want them to only use the Frontend, the closed Tickets are not so important. It is especially the Pending tickets i want to List, it should also only be available for the Support Staff.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
So, something like "Latest Open Tickets" but with Pending status instead of Open? We could implement that on the same page by having a status drop-down, default set to Open (but you could set it to Pending to do what you are looking for). Does that sound acceptable?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

hyperx
Yes it does, this would be great.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
I've added this feature to the latest development release (rev. E896AEFB). You can download and install it on a copy of your site to see if that covers your needs.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

hyperx
It seems to work fine. Thank you very much.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
You're welcome!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

πŸ‡¬πŸ‡·Greek: native πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§English: excellent πŸ‡«πŸ‡·French: basic β€’ πŸ• My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

System Task
system
This ticket has been automatically closed. All tickets which have been inactive for a long time are automatically closed. If you believe that this ticket was closed in error, please contact us.

Support Information

Working hours: We are open Monday to Friday, 9am to 7pm Cyprus timezone (EET / EEST). Support is provided by the same developers writing the software, all of which live in Europe. You can still file tickets outside of our working hours, but we cannot respond to them until we're back at the office.

Support policy: We would like to kindly inform you that when using our support you have already agreed to the Support Policy which is part of our Terms of Service. Thank you for your understanding and for helping us help you!