Intended use of Alerts for "Assigned Agent/Assigned Team"

[digidigital]

Prerequisites

• Can you reproduce the problem in a fresh installation of the "develop" branch?
• Do you have any errors in the PHP error log, or javascript console?
• Did you check the osTicket forums?
• Did you perform a cursory search to see if your bug or enhancement is already reported?

Description

The alerts guide https://docs.osticket.com/en/latest/Guides/Alerts%20Guide.html has this description for "New Internal Activity Alert":

New Internal Activity Alert: Alert sent out to Agents when internal activity such as an internal note or an agent reply is appended to a ticket.This Alert is sent to all members enabled; Duplicate alerts are not sent out.

further down..

Internal Activity Alert for the Assigned Agent/Team is sent to the assigned agent or team if there is no response from another agent posted on the ticket or the alert for last respondent is not enabled.

Please note the "or".

As I understand it, this means that only the assigned agent receives an alert, except in cases where no agent is assigned but a team is. Then the team is alerted.

According to this pull request the description in the guide may have matched the code in earlier versions (1.7.x) before it was "fixed" -> 6ffd571

At least in v1.18.1 the function onActivity works differently since "elseif ($team = $this->getTeam())" was changed to "if ($team = $this->getTeam())"

// Assigned staff / team
        if ($cfg->alertAssignedONTaskActivity()) {
            if (isset($vars['assignee'])
                    && $vars['assignee'] instanceof Staff)
                 $recipients[] = $vars['assignee'];
            elseif ($this->isOpen() && ($assignee = $this->getStaff()))
                $recipients[] = $assignee;

            if ($team = $this->getTeam())
                $recipients = array_merge($recipients, $team->getMembersForAlerts());
        }

• https://github.com/osTicket/osTicket/blob/develop/include/class.task.php#L1182
• https://github.com/osTicket/osTicket/blob/develop/include/class.ticket.php#L1958

Use case

Setup:

• Department "IT"
  • Team "Servicedesk"
  • Team "Admin"
• Sub-Department "IT / Application A"

Configuration:

• Department "IT" is the default department
• Incoming Tickets get standard Help-Topic "Standard"
• Help-Topic "Standard" tickets are assigned to team "Servicedesk" by default

Scenario:

• A ticket is received by email and automatically assigned to team "Servicedesk"

Variant A:

• An agent (Agent A) from Team "Servicedesk" is assigned to the ticket. (The ticket is now assigned to Agent A AND Team "Servicedesk" since team and agent assignments are independent from each other)
• Agent A does not reply to the ticket but creates a task (in the ticket) for an agent from Department "IT / Application A" (Agent B)
• Agent B completes the task an closes the task

Expected behavior:
Only Agent A is notified about the closed task

Actual behavior:
Agent A and all members of "Servicedesk" are notified

Variant B:

• The ticket is still assigned to team "Servicedesk" an has not been assigned to an individual agent
• The customer sends a reply to the auto-response
• The response is added to the ticket's thread

Expected and actual behavior:

• All members of "Servicedesk" get the notification

Suggested Solution(s)

Alternatives:

• Revert code back to be in line with documentation (fix the fix)
• Clarify documentation to be (more) in line with the current code (a feature not a bug)
• Add more notification options to cover more use cases: (new feature)
  -- Split current configuration option in separate "Assigned Agent" and "Assigned Team"
  -- Add "Cascaded Assigned Agent/Team" to cover the previously mention use case

Maybe related to #6473 ?

...at first I was a bit surprised that a ticket can be assigned to a team and an agent at the same time since the drop down in the "new ticket" form explicitly asks for an "agent or a team"

Versions

v 1.8.1

[JediKev]

@digidigital

The merged fix was correct; we simply need to update the documentation. Thanks for the notice.

Just to note, you can assign both an Agent and a Team to a single Ticket/Task. It’s been like that for a long time.

Cheers.