Update ticket based on subject

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I'm planning to use email2trac, but I have a small problem -- the email I need to use for requests is frequently CC'd by my clients as part of long conversation threads. As a result, a bunch of tickets are created that should really be updates to one ticket. Unfortunately, I can't really force them to set the #NNN for ticket number in the subject.

I was wondering if there is a possibility of an enhancement to update_ticket functionality: if there is a "Re:" in the subject and no ticket number, it would look at all tickets that are currently open and try to find a summary that matches the subject (with and without the "Re:"). If there is an open ticket with this match, it would update it instead of creating a new ticket.

[bas]

I have to think about this feature. What you describe sounds logical. A question is the initial conversation started from trac ticket response?

Mabye we can add a @ticket: <nr> in the mail thread. But people can also delete/change this. The same hold for the subject line.

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No, I'm usually cc'd in the middle of a discussion -- something like "Oh, while we're talking about it, can mricon also please do foo." The discussion then goes on between the original participants -- it stays relevant to what I need to do, but that results in 10 different tickets being created instead of all of it going into the ticket's comments. If I'm responding, I can set the subject to "Re: #nnn: [original subject]" but that's only a minor number of cases.

[bas]

For some projects at our site we have the same problem. It is on my todo list

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I was alternatively thinking of a separate plugin that could do "change ticket into a comment," but I think that would be less optimal. I'm currently making do with a combination of batchmodify plugins and ticket tracbacks plugin.

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Attempted solution

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I've attached a solution I came up with. There's a couple of places where it can be improved, most notably I currently hardcode the "lookback" to 30 days. The logic is thus:

if looking for ticket number in the subject fails, then if email contains a "Re:" or a similar reply identifier, then look for any summary matching subject without "Re:" within the last 30 days if not found, look for unmodified subject within the last 30 days if found, update that ticket else create ticket

[bas]

Thanks a lot for the patch. The first impression is it exactly what we need. Tomorrow at work i will apply it and test it on one of our projects.

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <icon@…>]

Slightly improved version of the patch.

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <icon@…>]

This version removes an extraneous comment about querying only open tickets, and reworks the logic for guessing the "original" email. Instead of looking for exact subject match, it does a more general LIKE query to avoid case sensitivity problems with "Re:" and "RE:" not resulting in a match.

[bas]

(In [353]) email2trac.py.in:

• Added patch to update ticket based on subject, see #188
• must be approved. It can not handle Re: [project name]: <subject>

[bas]

(In [354]) Some modification of ticket subject updates, see #188

[bas]

(In [356]) email2trac.py.in:

• added new function ticket_update_by_subject, see #188

[bas]

I have enabled this option for some internal SARA projects so we have a live test

[bas]

Dear Konstantin,

Did you have time to test the trunk version? I did not encounter any problems during the testing period ;-)

Regards

[bas]

I will close it. It is applied to trunk and did not encounter any problems

[bas]

(In [360]) Added an extra option ticket_update_by_subject_lookback in combo with ticket_update_by_subject. Default value is 30 days, see #188

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <icon@…>]

Here is an enhancement to "update-by-subject". Features:

1. Does a better job parsing out all the permutations of "Re: FW: Re: AW: Subject"
2. Modifies the subject to drop the prefixes

Tested in production for about 2 weeks, works pretty well.

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <icon@…>]

Enhancement to update-by-subject routines.

[bas]

Konstantin thanks for the patch, i will look into it.

[bas]

(In [487]) Enhancement to update-by-subject routines, closes #188