The Ticket Field Manager app allows an administrator to quickly hide, require, and disable certain ticket fields and drop-down options in the Zendesk Support agent interface.
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Installation
The Ticket Field manager is installed from the Zendesk Marketplace.
To install the app
- In Zendesk Support, click Admin (
), then select Apps > Marketplace. Enter "Ticket Field Manager" in the search bar at the upper right of the page. - Double-click on the Ticket Field Manager app icon, and click Install.
- In the Installation section, enter a name for the Ticket Field Manager app, and enable group and role restrictions if required. These configuration options are also available after installation by navigating to Admin > Apps > Manage.
- On the app details page, click Install.
Configuring the app
Once the app is installed, you can go into Admin > Apps > Manage, click the gear icon on the Ticket Field Manager app, and select Change settings.
In the settings, you can configure the ticket field behavior by updating the provided fields and adding a comma separated list of fields. For a custom ticket fields, use the field ID except when specifying hidden dropdown field options which uses the format full `custom_field_` and ID.
Note: The list of fields must have a space after each comma.
- Required form fields: Ticket fields that are required when creating or updating a ticket. For example:
field1, field2, field3, 360015591993 - Hidden form fields: Ticket fields that should be hidden from the agent when creating or updating a ticket. For example:
field1, field2, field3, 360015591993 -
Hide dropdown form options: Hide options for a given dropdown field. The format is [{"name": "type", "value": "problem"}], or for custom fields [{"name": "custom_field_3600152073", "value": "brushed_silver"}]. Note that this feature only works for hiding options from dropdown field types and is not available for multi-select field types.
To hide multiple dropdown values including those in the same field, use the format as shown in the following example.
[{"name": "type", "value": "problem"},
{"name": "custom_field_360015592073", "value": "diamond"},
{"name": "custom_field_360015592073", "value": "nickel_plated"},
{"name": "assignee", "value": "387300360473"}]
Notice that the name must be listed with the name and value for each option to be hidden, even for options in the same dropdown field.
Available ticket fields
Some available ticket fields include the following:
- requester
- assignee
- collaborator
- sharedWith
- status
- ticket_form_id (the ticket form dropdown)
- tags
- type
- priority
- problem
- custom field
For a complete listing of available fields for use in the form settings, see Zendesk Support placeholders reference.
Using the app
After creating a ticket or opening an existing ticket, you will see that the fields are now required based on the list defined in Required Form Fields. In this example, this includes Assignee, Tags, Type, and Priority.
If option in dropdown fields were hidden, you'll see that those options no longer appear for those roles and groups.
23 Comments
Hi Chris Fellows,
What if I use a form that without the required fields I set via "Ticket Field Manager app", I got an error below but not sure if this is the reason.
"Ticket Field Manager
_.find(...) is undefined"
Thanks & Regards,
Sue
I can confirm I'm getting precisely the same error.
I'm getting the same issue with the form.
[{"name": "ticket_form_id", "value": "360000960114"}]
I keep getting an error that says check console. Is this not the right format?
Edit: I also noticed I cant delete any values once entered. For instance if I have [{"name": "assignee", "value": "360000232887"}], I delete the entry and update, the entry still appears in the app. However, to get around this, you can edit the entry to [{"name": "", "value": ""}]. This will allow you to save, but will throw and error upon reload.
Edit2: Status isnt working as well.
Edit3: Cant get multiple values to work either.
An update on some of these issues. We've pushed out a new version and some fixes have been made to the app framework as well.
- Deleting values in the app settings once entered has been fixed. You should now be able to clear out settings that you no longer want and it will stick.
- We've also made a fix that should correct the issue with an error thrown when a required field is not on the current form.
- As for the drop down, that format may be incorrect. The value should be the name or the label for the value that you want to hide. For instance, I have a dropdown form called "Shirt color" that contains light red, dark blue, forest green, and butter yellow. If I wanted to hide butter yellow, the format would be [{"name": "Shirt color", "value": "Butter yellow"}]. However, when I was testing this, I had some issues getting the format to work for custom fields, so I'll be looking into this and will update here when I have progress to report.
Awesome!
With regards to the format, I would expect that the "value" would be the ID (in the case of system fields such as forms/assignees/etc.) and the tag (in the case of a drop-down). Your example seems to be at odds with the example in the article. The example in the article looks as if the "name" is the custom field ID and the "value" is the tag which supports the format I stated in my previous reply.
If this is not the case, could you update the article to provide better clarity on on especially for system related fields.
Thanks!
Alex - will do! I'm not entirely sure yet if I've found a bug or if it's just a formatting issue, but I'll make sure to provide some clarity in the article once I have that sorted out. :)
Thanks!
Tiffany Green, @Chris Fellows
When using the "Hide dropdown form options" feature, the app is only partially working. In the example below, the app is only hidding the first value in the array. It seems to be ingoring the other two.
[{"name": "80837188", "value": "item_a"},
{"name": "80837188", "value": "item_b"},
{"name": "80837188", "value": "item_c"}]
Any advice?
Chris - I just found the same thing about an hour ago. I tried a few variations on formatting that, but got the same result as you. I've added that to my list of items to work on. I'll keep you posted!
We've just released version 2.0.3 of this app which should the correct the issues you've been experiencing with the formatting of hiding multiple options from dropdown fields. And we've updated the examples shown in the article so that they are accurate with the new bug fix.
Let us know if you run into any other issues. Thanks all for keeping us posted!
Thanks for the update Tiffany Green. I've made the appropriate changes and it's working as expected, but we have some feedback.
Hiding specific dropdown values works, but it also hides them on closed tickets that have the value selected before it was hidden. This makes it look like a value was never selected on the closed ticket so I think it could cause some confusion. You would have to look at the event log or run a report to see what value is actually selected.
It would be great if there was an option to make hidden values visible on closed tickets.
Maybe if there was an option to keep the value visible in the dropdown list but greyed out and unselectable.
We typically want to remove a value because it's no longer applicable after a certain date. But we would still want to know if it was used when it was applicable.
Hi Chris Fellows.
Is it actually possible to hide status fields and what would the correct JSON syntax be?
I tested hiding the "Submit at solved" with but it doesn't work.
Thomas -
Do you mean hiding the Submit as Open / Submit as Solved button? It is not possible to hide that button with this app.
Chris -
Unfortunately, that's a pretty specific use case and would likely conflict with behavior that other users would expect to see. That might be something that you'd want to obtain a custom app to achieve.
Tiffany Green
But "Status" is mentioned in this list
Some available ticket fields include the following:
What can you do with the status field? I would like to e.g. hide the possibility to "Submit as Solved".
Hi Thomas - The field referred to in the list is any status field that shows on the left of the ticket or in any ticket forms. The Submit as Solved is a button, not a text field. I don't think that can be hidden. I did some checking, and I don't think it's possible to hide the ability for some agents to submit a ticket as solved.
Is there a way to implement the Readonly Fields whitelist groups that was in version 1.4?
Hi Jenesses - Unfortunately, not currently. There were a lot of versions of v1 that were out there, differing between each customer account. Whitelist was not one of the features that made it from the various versions of v1 into v2 due to some technical complexity in implementation. There are plans to spin off some different apps that expand upon the functionality of each part of Ticket Field Manager, but they're not on the immediate roadmap. In the meantime, using the groups and roles options at the bottom of the app settings page may get you part of the way to what you're looking for.
Hi Tiffany - I tried using the roles and groups but I'm unable to achieve the same results even for admin role.
Hello Jenesses -
Unfortunately, the roles and groups settings doesn't fill all the cases that the former whitelist does. We hope to spin up some apps that expand more on these features in the future, but at this time, there isn't anything that Zendesk has created that fills exactly what your version of the v1 app did.
Hey, for some reason starting today, our old existing version of Ticket Field Manager was preventing the submission of all tickets. The only thing we used this app for was to hide the sharedWith field but we also whitelisted it to 3 agent Groups that should still be able to use it.
Only way we found to resolve our issue with Tickets being able to be submitted was to install the new version of the Ticket Field Manager app. This app as the discussion above is limited compared to the prior one in that you can't whitelist. So this feature or ability would be greatly helpful.
Also, is there any insight as to why starting today? Was something deployed or changed that we are unaware of that all of a sudden stopped tickets from being submitted due to the old app?
Hey John,
You mentioned you're using an old version of the Ticket Field Manager app which is using the v1 apps framework. We made an announcement that these apps would be no longer work on Feb. 7th which would explain why you're experiencing this issue today. More information on the removal of the Zendesk Apps framework v1 here
Since today is the deadline for v1 apps, you'll need to upgrade to the new Ticket Field Manager app.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Hey Brett,
Thanks for the info....wow time flies by...I knew we got an extension on the v1 to v2 upgrade back in October...guess we spaced it that it was 2/7/2020 already! Thanks for the friendly reminder. :-)
-John
Happy to help John :)
Have a great weekend!
Possible to add a condition to the required field to make it required after X replies, X days, etc.? Sometimes, we may not have enough information to fill in the field at the ticket creation or first reply, so we want to give the Agent some time to learn what the ticket is about before forcing them to fill it.
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