Auto dispatch ticket to a team

Automatically dispatch tickets to teams when entering a state.

Allow to dispatch automatically Ticket based on predefined Dispatch rules, to a team and trigger a transition.

Each time a Ticket enter a state, iTop searched for Dispatch rules which apply to this class and state. If it finds one, then it uses each Team rules in order to retrieve a team. The Ticket is assigned to the first team found and Ticket is moved to a different state. If no team is found, the Ticket is left unchanged.

Example: when a Ticket is created, it is automatically dispatched to the team with role 'Support level1' defined on the customer Delivery Model, and moved to status 'Dispatch'.

This extension allows to define:

• different rules for different sub-class of Ticket,
• ordered queries to retrieve the team to use,
• force an automatic transition, if a team was set (thus triggering notification)

This extension is executed after combodo-approval-light or combodo-approval-extended, therefore if an Approval rule changes the object's state, Dispatch rules that should have been applied on the previous state will not be computed.

Dispatch rules must be defined on each final class, not on abstract class. This extension is not designed to set a team without changing the state.

• iTop 2.4 or later
• Extension SLA considering business hours v2.1 or more

Use the Standard installation process for this extension.

This extension does nothing out of the box, until you have created Dispatch rules to express when a Ticket should automatically assigned to a team and which team to use.

A dispatch rule is defined for one Class of Ticket. It must contain at least one Team rule and one State rule.

First create a new Dispatch rule by opening the corresponding menu under Service Management.

A State rule defines the state in which you want to auto-assign a team, and which transition must be applied if a team was found.

Create at least one State rule in the States tab.

A Team rule defines how to retrieve the team to assign.

Create at least one Team rule in the corresponding tab.

Remember that, there is a filter on Ticket.team_id:

SELECT Team AS t 
  JOIN lnkDeliveryModelToContact AS l1 ON l1.contact_id=t.id 
  JOIN DeliveryModel AS dm ON l1.deliverymodel_id=dm.id 
  JOIN Organization AS o ON o.deliverymodel_id=dm.id 
WHERE o.id = :this->org_id

Default Team

In beta version of auto-dispatch, iTop assigned a team using this logic

SELECT Team AS t 
  JOIN lnkDeliveryModelToContact AS l1 ON l1.contact_id=t.id 
  JOIN ContactType AS ct ON l1.role_id=ct.id
  JOIN DeliveryModel AS dm ON l1.deliverymodel_id = dm.id 
  JOIN Organization AS o ON o.deliverymodel_id=dm.id 
WHERE o.id=:this->org_id AND ct.name='Support level1'

Assigning a team based on Service

You may want to define a support team per Service,
in which case, the easiest is to link the applicable team to each Service and ensure that always one and one only team is linked to each service.

SELECT Team AS t 
  JOIN lnkContactToService AS l1 ON l1.contact_id=t.id 
  JOIN Service AS s ON l1.service_id=s.id 
WHERE s.id=:this->service_id

The best would be to add a new attribute support_team_id on Service, as an ExternalKey to a Team.

You may want to use the team defined on the Service when there is one, otherwise use the default team defined on the delivery model of the customer. In which case you will create 2 Team rules, one based on Service with the lowest rank and the other using the OQL above.

In some case you want to disable the Auto-assignment mechanism. For example, it is quite common that you want to Auto-Dispatch tickets created by users through the Portal, Ticket creation from Email, but do not want to do it, when the ticket is created by a synchro, a script or maybe an agent in the console.
That's the purpose of the Disabled contexts field.

It is even possible to disable a Dispatch rule just for one particular Portal or a particular DataSynchro. The syntax to use is:

• Portal:<portal-id> where <portal-id> is the portal id defined in the XML
• Synchro:<synchro-name> where <synchro-name> is the name of that particular Datasynchro

Examples: Let's say you have created a special portal for your agents and you want Tickets created through that portal not to be auto-dispatched.

  <portals>
    <portal id="agent-portal" _delta="define">
    ...

Then to disable the Dispatch rule, set Disabled contexts = Portal:agent-portal.

This behavior is designed to prevent Dispatching rules to be workaround by an agent by mistake.

In order to manually dispatched or assign a Request, the agent will have to create the Request first, then to apply the wanted transition, using the transitions actions.

Q: Can I auto-assign the Ticket using a criteria set in a Request template?
A: Yes if that criteria is an iTop object, so a drop-down list Field, which values are defined by an OQL.

For example, if you have define a Request Template Field location which propose the user to choose a site SELECT Location within the Request Template

• Then you have customized the Location class to add a team_id external key to the Team class, representing the Hands & Eyes team for that location
• Then you want to automatically dispatch Ticket which do have a Request Template with a location Field documented to the Hands & Eyes team for that location
• Then define a Team rule with this OQL

SELECT Team AS T 
  JOIN Location AS L ON L.team_id = T.id
  JOIN TemplateFieldValueLnk AS F ON F.field_target_key = L.id 
WHERE F.obj_class='UserRequest' 
  AND F.field_target_class = 'Location'
  AND F.obj_key = :this->id
  AND F.field_code = 'location'

In the picture below, it's even simpler, we use the Team provided by the Request Template as soon as there is one