Making conditional ticket fields required

Fastpath: Admin Center > Objects and rules > Tickets > Forms

This article describes how to make a conditional field a required ticket field. It also explains how ticket field and ticket form requirement settings in your admin settings affect each other. You must be an admin to make conditional ticket fields required.

This article includes these sections:

• Finding requirement settings
• Ticket field requirement settings
• Conditional ticket field requirement settings
• Making conditional ticket fields required
• Resolving unexpected alerts about required fields

Finding requirement settings

There are ticket field requirement settings in more than one place. Some are on your Ticket Fields and Ticket Forms admin pages. If you want to make a conditional field required, you will need to check the requirement settings in both places to make sure everything is set up the way you want it.

For example, here is what you see in your Ticket Fields settings. For example, go to Admin Center > Objects and rules > Tickets > Fields, and then open the ticket field for editing.

And here is what you see in your conditional ticket field settings. For example, go to Admin Center > Objects and rules > Tickets > Forms, and open the conditions for one of your ticket forms.

Ticket field requirement settings

You can select these settings from your Ticket Fields admin settings.

Settings

Description

Required to solve a ticket Required to submit a ticket

Required to solve a ticket and Required to submit a ticket are settings on ticket fields (from Manage > Ticket Fields). They can be overridden by conditional ticket fields. On conditions for agents: If Required to solve a ticket is enabled on the ticket field, Require is automatically set to When solved. Making a field Required makes the field Required to solve in most cases. Agents cannot solve the ticket until they complete the required field. On conditions for end users: If Required to submit a ticket is enabled on the ticket field, Required is automatically set to On submit. Making a field Required makes the field Required to submit a ticket. End users cannot submit the request until they complete the required field.

Conditional ticket field requirement settings

You can select these settings from your conditional ticket field Ticket Forms admin settings.

Settings	Description
Required	Use the Required drop-down list to specify when the field is a required field. By default, Required reflects the requirement setting on the ticket field (from Manage > Ticket Fields). You can manually clear the Required field, if you want to, which will make the ticket field optional on the ticket form.
Always	Selecting Always makes the field required in all cases, regardless of ticket status. Note the following about how this settings works: When you select Always, all other settings in the list are cleared. Selecting Always has a different result than selecting all of the ticket statuses in the list (When new, When open, When pending, When on-hold, When solved). When you select or clear all of the ticket statuses in the list, Always doesn’t automatically get enabled or disabled. When Required is Always, and the Status ticket field (one of your system fields in your Ticket Fields admin settings) is set to Enable on-hold status, the field is required when the ticket is On-hold.
Never	Selecting Never clears all of the ticket statuses in the list (When new, When open, When pending, When on-hold, When solved), including Always.
New Open Pending On-hold Solved	These are the system ticket statuses. If selected, the ticket field is required when submitting the ticket with this status. If you've activated custom ticket statuses, then additional ticket statuses may be available for selection.

Making conditional ticket fields required

Before you proceed, make sure you reviewed the rest of the information in this article and understand how ticket field and ticket form requirement settings affect each other.

You may want to open the ticket field for editing (go to Admin Center > Objects and rules > Tickets > Fields) and note whether Required to solve a ticket or Required to submit a ticket are selected.

To make conditional ticket fields required

1. Create a new condition for the ticket field or go to Admin Center > Objects and rules > Tickets > Forms to edit an existing ticket form.
2. Click the Required field.

   

3. From the drop-down list, select the requirement settings you want to use.

   Make sure you understand how the requirement settings you noted in step 1 will affect the behavior of your conditional ticket field. Clear any settings you don’t want to use.

4. If you are adding a new condition, click Add. If you are updating an existing condition, click Update.
5. Once you are done, remember to click the Save button to save the changes to the ticket form. Otherwise, your changes are lost.

Resolving unexpected alerts about required fields

Your agents may encounter situations where they try to submit a ticket, but then encounter an alert that states that a particular field is still needed. For example, something like this:

This can happen even though the field didn’t appear to be required.

The default ticket behavior may create a circumstance where a field becomes required, even though it wasn’t originally marked in the ticket interface as required (with an asterisk).

If you have questions about default ticket behavior (sometimes called “native system rules”), we recommend that you review About native system ticket rules to get a better understanding about how they work.

Example scenario

Let’s say you have a group with only one agent in it. Then, you create a new ticket that is routed to the group by a trigger. The ticket status will automatically become Open (instead of New) and the agent will become the assignee (instead of the group).

If there is a conditional field that is required When Open, you will see an alert when you try to submit the ticket as New, if the required field was not filled out.