• Upgrading to 5.0
  • Notable Changes
• UPGRADING FROM RTIR 5.0.0 AND EARLIER
• UPGRADING FROM 5.0.1 AND EARLIER
• UPGRADING FROM 5.0.3 AND EARLIER

Upgrading to 5.0

The following describes some of the more significant changes to RTIR 5.0 from earlier versions. The other UPGRADING documents contain details for previous versions.

Also read the general UPGRADING document for the steps to upgrade from a previous version of RTIR.

To match up RT 5 versions, we escalated RTIR from 5.0.1 to 5.0.3 directly, so there is no RTIR 5.0.2.

Notable Changes

• In RTIR 4.0, we modified the menu display to move each queue to a top level menu item when working inside RTIR. Each menu ended up having only a single "Create" entry and we haven't found new menu items to add for each queue. This change made it harder to access the default RT menus, so we have reverted to the previous configuration with a single RTIR menu item containing relevant links.

  To make it easier to access the RTIR menu, and to keep it in a consistent location, we moved it to the left, directly after the default RT Home menu.

• To align with RT's create pages we removed the modal to select queue before the create page and now give users the option to select queue directly on create. CreateInQueue.html still remains available in case users are linking directly to it but now logs a deprecated warning when accessed.

  CreateInQueue.html will be removed in a future version of RTIR. Please update any links directly accessing CreateInQueue.html to instead link to RTIR/Create.html or RTIR/Incident/Create.html.

• Previous versions of RTIR set RT's DefaultQueue option to Incident Reports. The new versions of RT and RTIR move the queue selection to the create page from the top action, so a new RTIR_DefaultQueue option is now available to set the default queue for RTIR create ticket pages.

  With this new RTIR-specific option, RTIR no longer automatically sets RT's DefaultQueue. You can still set it manually for your system via the RT configuration.

• The RTIR search page has been re-worked to use RT's base search features more directly. This gives RTIR full access to current and future search and reporting features added to RT.

  We have retained the features associated with the custom RTIR search interface including limiting queue selection to RTIR queues and providing some additional RTIR menu options.

  On the previous RTIR search, the Advanced and Bulk Update menu options were hidden. Visibility of these two menus is now managed with a new right in RT. The RT 5.0 upgrade process grants these rights to all Privileged users, but you can revoke these rights to restore the previous RTIR menu.

• On RTIR at a glance, the default configuration for Incident sections now includes Priority. Priority is also now a second-level sort, so Incidents will be ordered first by Due date (most Due first), then by Priority (highest priority first).

  RT 5.0 now defaults to managing priority with set values like "High" and "Low" rather than numbers, so you will see that in RTIR also. See the RT upgrade notes for details on how to set your Priority levels and for how to revert to number-based priority if you prefer.

  If you don't use Priority on Incidents, you can customize the search result columns with the "DueIncidents" entry in the %RTIRSearchResultFormats configuration.

• The Updates column in Incident ticket listings on RTIR at a glance now shows the number of unread messages on the Incident ticket rather than just Yes/No. As with Priority above, this setting can be customized with the "DueIncidents" entry in %RTIRSearchResultFormats. The previous option was called UpdateStatus and the new version is UnreadMessages.

• Default values for RTIR custom fields previously set using the configuration option %RTIR_CustomFieldsDefaults are now set using RT's core custom field default value feature. If you had defaults previously set, they will be migrated automatically during upgrade.

  RT supports setting these defaults both in the custom field configuration, which will set a default for all queues, and in the queue configuration for each individual queue.

  %RTIR_CustomFieldsDefaults now sets default values only for "Resolution" because the Resolution values are set based on the status of the Incident when closed.

• On Incidents, the linked tickets for Incident Reports, Investigations, and Countermeasures are now controlled via the new LinkedQueuePortlets feature in RT. If you previously modified the format of the link display on the Incidents page using %RTIRSearchResultFormats for ChildReport, ChildInvestigation, or ChildCountermeasure, you can copy that configuration to the new %LinkedQueuePortletFormats option.

• Before RTIR 4.0 you could launch an incident and investigation on a single page. This feature was removed in RTIR 4.0, but has been restored in RTIR 5.0.0. It has also been updated to allow the queue for each section to be selected on the create page.

UPGRADING FROM RTIR 5.0.0 AND EARLIER

• RTIR display pages now support inline edit, similar to the core RT feature. The configuration option %InlineEditPanelBehavior, as documented in RT, allows you to set the edit behavior. To set different behavior for RTIR, you can use the key RTIR::Ticket with the same format as that documented for RT::Ticket.

UPGRADING FROM 5.0.1 AND EARLIER

• "RTIR at a glance" is now a dashboard

  "RTIR at a glance" previously could be customized and was stored as a special configuration used just for the RTIR homepage. It is now a dashboard just like other dashboards in RT. With this update, you can now easily change your entire RTIR homepage by selecting a different dashboard to be your default homepage. This update aligns with RT where a similar change was made in RT 5.0.2.

  After upgrading, RTIR at a glance should look the same as it did previously, but there are various changes in how it is managed.

  The previous global RTIR at a glance page is converted to a new System dashboard called "RTIR Homepage". Individual users with a custom homepage will see a new dashboard in "My Dashboards" called "RTIR Homepage". These are regular dashboards now, so the names can be changed if desired.

  The gears icon on the RTIR homepage now links to a page that displays all available dashboards and users can select their default homepage from the list. To customize, users can create a new dashboard. The privacy of dashboards can be set to an individual user, a group, or system-wide, depending on the user's rights. This makes it easy to set up and share useful RTIR homepage configurations.

  Users who want to customize their homepage need the rights "ModifySelf", "CreateOwnDashboard", "DeleteOwnDashboard", "ModifyOwnDashboard" and "SeeOwnDashboard". All users who have "ModifySelf" are automatically granted these dashboard rights as part of the RT 5.0.2 upgrade. You can modify these rights as desired if you don't want users to be able to create dashboards.

  All users can see the default System dashboard set for RTIR. If you want to allow users to see other System dashboards, grant the "SeeDashboard" right. This is not done automatically with the upgrade.

• Global "RTIR at a glance" configuration page

  For RT admins, Admin > Global > RTIR at a glance is now available, and instead of loading the page configuration editor, it shows a list of System dashboards that can be set as the default homepage.

• RT's Default Article Content Custom Field is Deselected

  When initially installing RT, a global custom field Content is created and applied to Articles. RTIR also creates an Article custom field on installation, called Response. The default DutyTeam group has rights to use the Response CF, but not the Content CF and typically for boilerplate email responses you need only one custom field. The extra CF can also cause issues with automatically inserting content on the ticket reply page.

  As part of this update, we deselect the Content CF from the Templates class, which is the default for RTIR. This should make the Response CF work as intended. If you are using the Content CF in some way, you can edit the Templates class configuration and enable it again.

• CVE ID Custom Field Added

  A new default custom field called CVE ID is added with this upgrade. On Incidents with a CVE defined, some information about the CVE from the NIST vulnerability system is displayed on the page with a link to the full description on the NIST website.

  CVE IDs can also now be parsed and automatically added to this custom field from incoming email, similar to IP addresses.

  If you don't track CVEs with your RTIR instance, you can disable the custom field and the new scrips.

• Run Transaction Batch last, even in nested updates

  When RTIR processes scrips, Batch mode scrips should always run last. Previously, with nested updates, inner updates would run batch before all outer updates were complete. One example of this is processing ticket updates, the Basics update calls an inner "atomic" transaction to update Owner, which would cause the unexpected batch run. This has been fixed so batch runs only once for the outermost updates. All transactions performed for that batch are available from the TransactionBatch method as expected.

  This mirrors a change also made in RT 5.0.2.

• Incident Reply Updates

  On the Incident Reply to Reporters and Reply to All pages, "Worked" is now in a new "Incident Time Taken" section to make it clear that you are recording time worked on the incident, and to make it easy to do so. Previously there was a Worked field in the Reply section, which would then apply time to all linked tickets.

  The goal of the Reply to All pages is to send out a notification or update to multiple people in one step, so the time you are reporting is usually on the Incident ticket, not once per linked ticket. However, this is a change from the previous behavior. This update allows for cleaner integration with RT::Extension::TimeTracking, which provides additional time tracking features.

  Processing of the update message was also moved before processing of other ticket updates like Basics (status, etc.), custom fields, and dates. This makes RTIR more consistent with RT, but it's possible this could impact scrips if the relied on Basics or other updates running before message updates. If you have this issue, moving the scrip to Batch mode may restore the previous behavior.

UPGRADING FROM 5.0.3 AND EARLIER

• Process Articles for Incidents

  Starting with RTIR 5.0.4, we include a new portlet on the Incident page which can show the process to be followed for an Incident based on the selected Classification.

  Default articles for the process documentation are installed in new RTIRs by default. For an existing RTIR system, you can also add the starter articles by running the following after your upgrade:

      cd /opt/rt5
      sbin/rt-setup-database --action insert --datafile local/plugins/RT-IR/etc/upgrade/process_articles_initialdata

• Allow DutyTeam to See Templates Articles

  This upgrade runs a step to grant the default DutyTeam group rights to see custom fields in the Templates class. This allows DutyTeam members to use articles when corresponding on tickets. This right was previously omitted in error.

  If you explicitly do not want DutyTeam to see the articles in the Templates class, you can edit the class and remove the SeeCustomField right after you run the upgrade.

• "How Reported" no longer defaults to Email

  In previous versions of RTIR, RT::Action::RTIR_SetHowReported automatically set the "How Reported" custom field on Incident Reports to "Email" if no value was provided. In RTIR 5.0.4 we updated this action to get the value from RT's "CurrentInterface" in RT method, so it will automatically be set to values like "Web" or "REST2" if a ticket is created that way rather than always "Email".

  If you prefer defaulting to "Email", you can disable this scrip and set "Email" as a default value in the Incident Reports queue configuration.

  If you want to see new values set automatically, you can update you values list for "How Reported" to include these new values:

      "API", "CLI", "REST", "REST2", and "Web"