• Feeds
  • Spreadsheet
    • Importing into Microsoft Excel
    • Importing into OpenOffice
  • RSS
  • iCal
  • Secret Tokens

Feeds

RT offers several feeds that provide RT data in formats suitable for integrating with external applications. This document describes the available feeds and some ways they can be used.

The feeds are based on a ticket search you create using the RT Query Builder, available at Tickets > New Search or, starting in RT 4.2, Search > Tickets > New Search. After you create your search, the search results page has a Feeds menu in the upper right-hand corner. That menu contains the feeds described below.

Spreadsheet

If you click the Spreadsheet link, a tab-separated values (.tsv) file is downloaded containing the results from the search you performed in the browser. You can then import the file into a spreadsheet application like the OpenOffice spreadsheet or Microsoft Excel.

Pulling ticket data into a spreadsheet can be handy if you want to manipulate a subset of your ticket data outside of RT. Depending on what you're doing with the data, once you have it in the form you need (sorted, summed, etc.) you can sometimes reproduce the report back in RT. This has the advatage of making it dynamic and you can share the resulting report with other users as a shared search or dashboard.

Depending on your browser brand and settings, the downloaded spreadsheet may be given a .xls extension, a .tsv extension, or no extension at all. If it gets a .xls extension, the spreadsheet file will likely already be associated with a spreadsheet application. In this case, you can double-click on the file to open it. You may see a warning about the file format, since it is a tsv file and not a .xls file, and then the application will either convert the file automatically or open a dialog to guide you.

If your system doesn't automatically associate the tsv file, the following sections describe how to manually import a tsv file in some common applications.

Importing into Microsoft Excel

If the file is given a .tsv extension or no extension, here's how to open it in Excel 2010:

1. Select File > Open, locate the file on your system and click Open.

2. In the Text Import Wizard, select Delimited, import starting at row 1, and leave the default File origin. Click Next.

3. In the Delimiters section, select Tab if it isn't selected by default. Leave the other settings with default values. Click Next.

4. The last dialog lets you define the column formats for the imported columns. You can also exclude some columns from the import. 'General' will try to guess for you. Click Finish.

Importing into OpenOffice

If OpenOffice doesn't automatically open the Text Import dialog when you try to open the file, here's how to open a tsv manually:

1. Open a new Spreadsheet document

2. Select Insert > Sheet From File...

3. In the file selection dialog, find the file downloaded from RT. By default, the name is Results.

4. In the Separator options, click the checkbox Separated by: Tab. Uncheck any other options that might be checked. Click OK.

5. On the Insert Sheet dialog, select where you want to put the new sheet and click OK.

RSS

You can use the RSS feed to subscribe using your RSS feed reader of choice. The feed entries provide the ticket subject, a link to the ticket, and the content of the first transaction on the ticket.

iCal

The iCal link uses your search to provide a feed suitable for subscribing to from a calendaring application like Mozilla Lightning (the Thunderbird calendar), Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, or Apple iCal. You can copy the link and use your calendar application's subscribe feature to pull in and display ticket dates.

The feed provides Starts and Due dates from the selected tickets. In RT 4.0, the calendar events are day-long events, which can be handled differently in different calendar applications. The events also contain a URL linking to the ticket and some calendars will display this link with the event.

RT 4.2 adds the "$TimeInICal" in RT_Config option, which will include times in the iCal feed so you can have calendar events at a specific time. In addition, you can provide SingleEvent=1 as an additional query parameter to have tickets generate a single event using the Start and Due dates/times as the start and end values for the event. You can put the parameter on the end of the iCal feed URL, for example:

    https://myrt.example.com/NoAuth/iCal/user/...?SingleEvent=1

This is useful if you have tickets with shorter durations, like scheduled maintenance for example.

Secret Tokens

All of your RSS and iCal feeds embed a secret token that is specific to your RT user account. You should never share your feed urls with other people, otherwise they can see tickets as your user. If one of your feed urls is accidentally shared, you can reset your token to disable all old feed urls. To do so, start by logging into RT and go to Logged in as … > Settings > About me. In the lower right-hand corner, there is a link "I want to reset my secret token" and it does just that.

Note that this will disable all of your existing feeds. After updating the token, you'll need to update all of your feed urls.