You can create drop-down lists that contain multiple levels of organization (up to 66). This is done using the same technique for organizing macros (see Organizing your macros).
Note: For information about creating custom drop-down fields, see Adding customer ticket fields, Adding custom fields to users, and Adding custom fields to organizations.
The titles of your custom field options contain the categories and selection value separated by double colons, like this:
Tip: When you click Preview, the drop-down list will not show nested fields. To check the fields work correctly, save your changes, and test the drop-down list in a ticket.
On the request form, the custom drop-down list looks like this:
As with drop-down list options that do not contain categories, your tags should be for the selection value.
59 Comments
@tommiyahira
What problem does the exporting of values of a single custom ticket field to CSV or Excel solve for you?
@Kiran
It definitely helps with organization.
It's been only around 2 weeks since I created this new tiered ticket field which started off with approximately 20 values but has since expanded close to 50 values and is still growing.
Trying to organize values in the UI is challenging since your just looking at text strings and can't efficiently or accurately categorize the values.
I have used a similar approach (exporting to csv) to organize my macros (around 118 last I looked). I basically exported the entire macro list into a csv and I am not in the process of reorganizing them by splitting each category into one Excel column. I even went as far to formulate a concatenate field to compile macro so it is just a copy/paste effort. By doing so, it makes it much easier to see what i currently have to determine if is still applicable, if I need to archive it, or if I have to relabel it.
Additionally, being able to import from csv or Excel would be a great option to have. Having to type each individual value or copy/pasting a list from Excel doesn't seem to be very efficient or sensible.
Hi, whats the maximum number of options possible for dropdown menus?
I would like to add dropdowns with country and language options
Hey Niels!
You should be able to add as many dropdown options as you need, but we recommend not going over 1500 or so to avoid performance issues.
Drop us a line at support@zendesk.com if you run into issues as you set up!
Thanks Jon - that should get me started :)
Trying to figure out where you find these dropdown with levels.
This is what I see under a ticket field
Where exactly do I add submenues under these field values?
Michael,
You can create submenus by adding two colons between levels of the menu. So, taking Quick Ticket as an example, you can do Quick Ticket::Product A, then Quick Ticket::Product B to have a dropdown when you select Quick Ticket, allowing you to choose Product A or Product B. You can do additional levels, such as Quick Ticket::Product A::Refund Request, allowing you to put a lot more options into a much smaller initial dropdown.
Hope that helps!
Hi! I have Enterprise Zendesk and conditional fields app to do basically what is here proposed. However, my agents are going to use Zendesk in a tablet (Samsung Galaxy Tab A). The conditional fields do not work in the tablet, so I went using the browser. For some reason the conditional fields show when the trigger is selected, but then the on-screen keyboard tries to load (there should be no typing in drop-downs) and I can't select any option to continue the process. I have actually 143 conditions that cannot use. Looking through your help desk I arrived here, and decide it to give it a try, but it doesn't work as explained. I tried for example Brand::Category::PartA and the options won't hide or divide onto sub-menus. Can anyone please let me know if I am missing something to make this work?
We use custom drop-downs by agents to "categorize" each ticket we receive from our customers. We run reports on our top "categories" we receive from these categorize chosen by agents so we know what are the top type of tickets were getting.
Over time, this list of these categories and sub-categories that agents have to scroll thru, looking for the right one have grown and its becoming unmanageable. Is there a way to make some of these drop down options hidden from agent view (or moved in a way) so for historical data reference they are still being calculated?
Hi Thor!
There are a couple of things you can do, as we ran into this as well. When we first started, we had our categories in a mannor where all products and categories were in the same menu. Over time, this became very unruly due to the number of options available. Our old menu would look like this:
Product1::Category::SubCategory1::SubCategory2::SubCategory3::SubCategory4
You can delete this from your list, and the tickets will remain with the same tag, which is added when you add the category to the ticket. Using the above example, the tag would be:
Product1__Category__SubCategory1__SubCategory2__SubCategory3__SubCategory4
So you could retain reporting on the tags instead of the categories.
Another step we took was to use various ticket forms. Instead of having all of our products and their categories in one menu, each product has a unique ticket form now, and each form has it's own category menu for that product. We're a software company, and we were able to break the forms out for mobile app users or for web app users, which further removes options for the category menus.
Hope that helps!
My values are not nesting. Any idea why?
@James Nguyen I've never tested that out in Preview :D. When I do, I'm not getting the nesting either. However when I save and refresh, the nesting works as expected on the ticket in the Agent Interface.
Let us know if it's working once you save?
@Heather, Yup! The nesting displays correctly in the Agent interface. I think I missed the tip in the documentation.
Thank you!
@james -
One more tip... I would check your tags for those areas because you might end up with a really really really really (did I say really?) long tag on the ones you have listed there. Maybe you want to shorten the tag to something you can recognize but wouldn't clog your tags field in the ticket which we can't hide (**shaking fist at the Zendesk UI team**).
Keep in mind, though, that the tag is what's pulled for reports and exports, so you want something recognizable as I mentioned but also usable in reports. Like in a top 10 report or something.
Have a great day, all!
@twilson
How do you recommend/wish drop-down list options be organized?
If you have 5 or so options in the drop down list, is there a way to make the box get bigger to prevent having to scroll? I can see the top of the last option, yet i still have to scroll down to select it. Can we make that box grow as needed?
Hey Ed,
If you're trying to alter this for the end-users perspective you'll most likely need to accomplish this using custom code in your Guide theme. We got some documentation which I've attached below which you may find useful:
We're limited on what we can assist with on our end when it comes to customizing the Help Center so I'll leave this for other community members to jump in and offer up some guidance.
Cheers!
I have looked into the code and can not find anything about the window size for that. Was hoping someone had figured something out. I can see that the Zendesk site works the same so I am not sure it's possible. Worth asking though...
Thanks for the reply.
Hey Ed,
I did some additional digging around our Community Forum and I couldn't find any custom code that addressed this particular use-case, unfortunately.
Hopefully, other users can jump in here and offer up some guidance if there's a solution available.
Cheers!
We figured it out... Just add this to the bottom of the CSS file if you are using Copenhagen theme. This worked for us anyway.
.nesty-panel {
max-height: 600px;
}
This is awesome. Thanks for taking the time to share this with everyone Ed :)
I am struggling to make nested categories for macros. I followed the steps above placing "::" in the title, but it does not create a drop down. Am I doing something wrong?
Hi Kelly,
Could you post a screenshot of the formatting you've got in the macro names for us to look at with you?
I adding in the "::" between the levels, but as you can see from my first screenshot in the above comment, the nested categories are not appearing. Please tell me what I am doing wrong! Thanks!
Hi Kelly O'Malley
It looks like you're trying to select a macro by typing in the search box. When you do that, it only lists out macros, although it does indicate the different levels with the ">" character. If you scroll down the macro list instead of searching, you'll find the "test" category with an arrow on the right. Clicking on "test" will show the sub-categories or macros listed beneath it, sort of like this:
I think this can't be done because of the way the nested fields setup, but I have to ask. Has someone found a way to display only part of the "nest" to an end-user but agents can see all of it?
So users see:
Setup::Assembly
but an agent will see:
Setup::Assembly::Missing parts::Missing screws
The use case is we have a four-level nested issue field that we think is too many clicks in for our end-users, but do want to keep that granularity for reporting, so we're hoping that the end-users fill in up to second level (two clicks) and then agents can drill down and take the field value down to the fourth level.
Because we don't want a separate agent only field for this.
Hi Alexandra,
No, that fields can't be partially hidden based on user role.
I tried making a field as instructed in the post just to see how it works. I am able to see the value in hierarchy as expected but the value selected is not getting saved in the ticket after submitting the ticket.
Note: All the other text field & drop-down field value are getting saved except this one.
Could you please help on this?
Hi Azhar,
Please chat in from your account to look at the example in more detail with our support team.
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