Ticket Import from old system

[keithf4]

Has anyone written any kind of a guide to importing another ticket system into OTRS? Like what fields in the DB need to be filled in so a raw, imported ticket done directly to the DB shows up properly in the system. Can write the script and stuff myself, I'm just having a hard time figuring out how to get all the fields matched up and what fields I may have to fill with generic info.

Thanks!

[crythias]

You could use SOAP to do it. There's an api. Alternatively, if you could make emails from the tickets, you could do it that way, though open and close time won't be maintained.

Otherwise, populating ticket and ticket_history and maintaining referential integrity could be problematic.

[keithf4]

Yeah, I'd brought up to the boss about just emailing the currently open tickets in our system over to OTRS, but he replied back about losing the original date creation times. The data integrity of doing a direct DB import was my concern too.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with SOAP api's. I found this post in the Wiki on using PHP with it:

http://wiki.otrs.org/index.php?title=Cr ... HP_via_RPC

How do you know what fields to use in the SOAP call? Can you set the date of the ticket to something other than the default one done at creation via the SOAP api to keep the original ticket creation dates?

Appreciate the help

[crythias]

No. Any transfer/creation of tickets via api will timestamp current_timestamp.

[crythias]

http://dev.otrs.org/
Click Kernel::System::Ticket

perldoc also helps if you understand it.

[keithf4]

Not that much of a perl programmer, but I'll take a look at it. I think the fact that it's not going to preserve the old ticket dates is going to bring a halt to the attempt at importing the old tickets via the API. And doing direct to the DB is just scary at this point.

Greatly appreciate your help!