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Cron tasks and the Issue Tracker component
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Cron tasks and the Issue Tracker component

There are currently four specific cron enabled tasks that can be configured with the Issue Tracker component. There may be others introduced as the product evolves.

Table 4.1. Issue Tracker Scheduled Tasks.

Task Name

Description

autoclose

Intended to automatically close issues that are in a status identified as 'waiting for customer' and to which no update has been made for the specified number of days. The issue is set to a 'closed' status and an entry made in the progress record to that effect and also an entry made in the issue tracker log if component logging is enabled.

efetch

Fetches emailed messages that are then used to either create new issues in the system or to update existing issues.

esummary

Creates an Issue summary report that is then emailed out to the recipients.

eoverdue

Creates a report of overdue issues within the system and send each assigned person the list of their overdue issues.

The name of the task is the name required for entry in the URL address when the CRON mechanism is used for accessing the front end web page.

Auto Close of Issues waiting for user or customer

One common occurrence is that a user or customer reports a problem which is then followed as an 'issue' within Issue Tracker. The support staff update the issue as progress upon the issue is performed, until a situation is reached where the issue is considered resolved internally. At this stage it is usual to supply the 'solution' to the original reporter such that they may verify that the issue is indeed resolved to their satisfaction.

The Issue Tracker system will notify the raiser of the suggested resolution (provided notifications for the user is set, and the component options are suitably set) and the status is changed to a status such as 'Waiting for User'. It is however extremely common to then hear nothing from the raiser upon the problem what so ever. Repeated emails are silently ignored, and all the while the issue is sitting upon the system is a non-closed state.

The auto close scheduled task is intended to address this problem. Upon running it is supplied with the status code for the 'Waiting for user' status and the required number of days of no activity upon the issue that is to pass before the issue should be set to the 'closed' status.

Upon identifying an issue that matches the supplied criteria, the task will change the issue status to 'Closed'. It will also add a new progress entry to the issue noting the changed status. If the component logging option is set, it will also add an entry to the Issue Tracker log with the changed status information.

The script accepts one optional parameters, which is a value specified for the number of overdue days to check (olderthan). If not specified the default as given in the component parameters is used. The way in which the parameters are specified will depend upon whether the task is run from the front end or from the PHP CLI script.

If run from the PHP command line the parameters are specified as follows:

--olderthan xxxx

Where xxx is an integer value specifying the number of days to use for checking whether an issue has been in the 'Waiting for User' state.

If run from the front end then append the parameters to the end of the URL as shown below. Note that the defaults are as specified above.

&olderthan=xxxx

Release 1.6.7 added the sending of a message to the identifier of the issue upon a issue being auto closed by the cron task.

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