How to Keep Subject Line from Changing Upon Update

[MWMeads]

When an agent does an 'in-bound call' or 'out-bound call' update to a ticket, the Subject line is set by default to 'Phone Ticket', or something along that line. If the agent puts the original subject in there, it stays the same but at that point has the ability to change the subject of the ticket.

How can we stop this from happening? Can we make it to where once the Subject is a certain thing, it stays that way regardless? Or when you do a reply or such, that it keeps the same subject name?

[MWMeads]

No one has any idea as to how to do this?

[bjohnson222]

I'm curious about this myself. It seems that when you do a "Phone Call Inbound" to create an article for a new incoming customer call, the subject of that new article now shows up as the subject of the entire ticket because the ticket views seem to display the most recent *customer article subject* as the ticket subject. And obviously the default (Phone call!) isn't terribly descriptive, so if the agent doesn't update that, you could end up with a lot of tickets seeming like they have "Phone call!" as their subject!

I was trying to find a way in SysConfig to make the default Phone Call Inbound and Outbound subjects be the same as the existing ticket subject, but I couldn't. The parameters are Ticket::Frontend::AgentTicketPhoneInbound###Subject and Ticket::Frontend::AgentTicketPhoneOutbound###Subject, but I can't figure out what value I should use to reference the current ticket subject. I tried $QData{"Subject"} and various formations of <OTRS_CUSTOMER_Subject>, but neither of them got interpreted correctly. You can set it to blank, but you'll still have the same problem - when the agent logs a new Phone Call Inbound, whatever he/she puts in the subject of that article effectively looks like the subject of the whole ticket.

I'm sure there must be some way to reference the ticket subject from those SysConfig parameters - but not sure how. Hope someone can help.

[bjohnson222]

Well I did find this in SysConfig:

Ticket::Frontend::OverviewSmall###ColumnHeader

By default it's set to "LastCustomerSubject" but you can change it to "TicketTitle".

That worked for me. In the "small" overview, it now shows the ticket subject (called the title) instead of the most recent customer subject from the "phone call inbound" article. If you go to "medium" overview or "preview" list, you'll still see the most recent customer subject under "Subject", but the *title* of the ticket is still prominently displayed at the top of the ticket.

Hope this helps!

[mjunek]

As a further query along this line - is there any way of setting the ColumnHeader to TicketTitle for the _customer_ interface? Our customers are getting confused with 10 open tickets saying 'Phone Call!' on their web interface.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks
Michael

[bjohnson222]

Great question... on our OTRS, we don't have our customers logging in to the portal - it's more for our internal use. I did a quick look through the SysConfig and I couldn't find anything specifically for the customer frontend. It does seem like it should be an option though... I can imagine it gets very confusing!

The only workaround I can think of is to have your agents just add a "Note" when a customer calls with an update instead of using the "Phone Call Inbound" option. When you use "Phone Call Inbound", the new article that gets created is a *customer* article and so its subject will replace the ticket title in the customer portal ticket overview. But "Note" creates an *agent* article, so the ticket title should remain unchanged.

[nbyc]

We don't do phone support, so having both outbound and inbound phone reply options does not make sense for us.
I disabled inbound phone feature and modified "phone outbound" to just be "reply".
And having to specify a subject line to be different than the original query also does not make sense for us.

So I directly edited Kernel/Output/HTML/Standard/AgentTicketPhoneCommon.dtl to bypass the value set in Ticket::Frontend::AgentTicketPhoneOutbound###Subject.
from:
<input type="text" name="Subject" id="Subject" value="$QData{"Subject"}" class="Validate_Required $QData{"SubjectInvalid"} W75pc"/>
to:
<input type="text" name="Subject" id="Subject" value="$QData{"TicketNumber"} - $QData{"Title","60"}" class="Validate_Required $QData{"SubjectInvalid"} W75pc"/>