CM/Track: Data Availability For Customers

Introduction

When configuring CM/Track for your customers, you need to decide which part of the information stored in the customers’ tickets you want to share with the customers and which information should be kept internal. There are two aspects which need to be handled for this purpose:

• Ticket history entries: comments, emails and attachments
• Ticket fields

Visibility of History Entries

The visibility of ticket history entries is configured using text classes, see Classes of Text. All entries which are marked with a text class which is customer readable are visible for the customer when he views a ticket. This applies to:

• comments
• emails
• attachments

When the engineer wants to share a comment, email or attachment with the customer, he needs to set a text class which is customer readable to the respective history entry.

The default text class is not customer readable. This means that comments written by the customer in CM/Track and emails which are exchanged with the customer are not visible in CM/Track unless an engineer selects another text class for the respective history entry. Usually, there are some situations where you want to make history entries available directly, e.g. if the customer adds a comment, this comment should be displayed in the ticket history immediately. You need to adapt the workflows so that a suitable text class is assigned automatically to this kind of history entries.

Visibility of Ticket Fields

The visibility of ticket fields in CM/Track can be configured for ticket field groups and for single ticket fields by using annotations. In addition, the visibility is affected by system properties and the active client configuration.

The following sections describe the different places where the configuration is made and their combination.

System Properties

The value of cmas-rest-api, security.fields.customer.exposure.check.enabled determines whether the ticket field annotations are checked or not.

• true: The customer can only see the ticket fields which are explicitly annotated as visible in CM/Track.
• false: The customer can see all ticket fields in CM/Track.

Annotations

The annotations which are assigned to ticket fields are only considered if the system property security.fields.customer.exposure.check.enabled is set to true. They can be assigned to ticket field groups or ticket fields:

• Ticket field groups:
  Annotation customer exposure group with the following values:
  • full: The fields in this ticket field group are displayed in CM/Track and their values can be modified.
  • read: The fields in this ticket field group are displayed in CM/Track.
• Ticket fields:
  Annotation customer exposure with the following values:
  • full: The ticket field is displayed in CM/Track and its value can be modified.
  • read: The ticket field is displayed in CM/Track.
  • none: The ticket field is not displayed in CM/Track.

The value of the annotation on field basis overwrites the value of the group annotation. In this way, you can fine-tune the visibility of single fields within a group.

The annotations group-visiblity (for ticket field groups) and visibility (for single ticket fields) will work in any case and are stronger than the customer exposure group and customer exposure annotations, i.e. when a group or field is annotated with (group-)visibility = none, it will not be displayed, no matter what customer exposure (group) annotation might been set.

Client Configuration

The JSON client configuration also influences which fields are displayed in CM/Track. The setting expandable in the layout options, determines whether all fields with the corresponding annotations are displayed or not.

• true: Ticket fields which are not explicitly mentioned in the JSON layout attribute but which are annotated as customer exposed will be displayed.
• false: Only ticket fields which are explicitly mentioned in the JSON layout attribute are displayed.

Fields which are mentioned in the JSON layout attribute but not annotated as customer exposed are not available in CM/Track.

See Design and Configuration of REST-based ConSol CM Client GUIs.

Combinations

The following table shows the effect of the different combinations on a certain field.

• System property: value of security.fields.customer.exposure.check.enabled

• Client configuration: value of expandable

• Annotation: assignment of customer exposure to the field, if not assigned, assignment of customer exposure group to the field group

System property	Client configuration	Annotation	Effect
false	false	*	The ticket field is only displayed if it is mentioned in the layout attribute of the client configuration.
false	true	*	The ticket field is displayed.
true	*	no	The ticket field is not displayed.
true	false	yes	The ticket field is only displayed if it is mentioned in the layout attribute of the client configuration.
true	true	yes	The ticket field is displayed.