Question
How does the Zendesk Labs Project Management app link child and parent tickets?
Answer
The Project Management app uses the built-in field for tickets called external_id:
The parent ticket ID is value for the external_id for itself and for all subsequent child tickets. For example external_id = 138061584 for both parent and child tickets. There are also additional tags added:
- Parent ticket: project_138061584 and project_parent
- Child tickets: project_138061584 and project_child
These values are particularly important when you're trying to troubleshoot or find tickets you think should be linked and showing in the app.
A simple way to find parent and child tickets is to perform a search in support using something like the following:
external_id:138061584
4 Comments
Is there a way to automate the creation of child tickets based upon the parent ticket?
Hey Nicole!
Interesting question. I think you could do definitely do this through the api. As mentioned above I believe the app is only looking for the external_id and tags above. The external_id number you see above I believe is based on the parent ticket_id. So as long as you grab the parent and update the tickets external_id and tags the same as the app does, it should show up in the project management app. Should be fairly easy to test this as you could update a new parent and child with the api with those values and refresh the app. It should show.
As far as bulk doing this in general, as mentioned you'd use the tickets api do do this is in a script of some sort.
https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/support/tickets
Would this be possible through a trigger? After a particular type of record was created?
Hey Nicole!
I think this is a yes, but with a caveat :) Unfortunately I don't believe by default you can update the external_id of the ticket through a trigger. The best way to do something like this is to use the method I mentioned above, but set it up as a service. You can create a trigger that calls a target which is your service and that service can update the ticket externally. This is useful as if you run into issues on the update, you can retry, etc. There may even be something that can do this in our app store.
Your going to want to setup an html or url target for this.
For more info on targets I'd start here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203662136-Notifying-external-targets
You'll notice that you can technically call the Zendesk api through the target as well, however this is not recommended as you can run into ticket data collision issues as noted here:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/234658247-Can-I-use-a-trigger-and-a-target-to-update-tickets-
Hopefully this helps a bit.
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