Auto-Closure Failed Messages

[slcadmin]

We recently added a number of ‘required’ fields to one of our ticket types to assist with ticket triage on ingress. However, any existing tickets of that ticket type are now receiving failure warnings as part of the auto-closing feature after 5 days.

Automatic Ticket Closing
====================
Ticket closing has failed!
One or more required custom fields are not filled in.
Please take the necessary actions to manually close this ticket.

Should we have just cloned the old ticket type into a new ticket type, disabled the old, and enabled the new to facilitate a smoother transition to required fields? Is there any way for the failure notifications to not email the ticket contacts during this transition so that we don’t receive additional tickets opened about the failure notifications themselves?

[Bruce_B · Accepted solution]

This question was also received via email. We've added our reply below for everyone else's benefit.

Indeed, when newly implementing some Required for Closing custom fields we would recommend either moving the old tickets of that type to another ticket type, or to create a new ticket type to set up these additional Ticket Custom Fields.

Since at this point you've already set up the new ticket custom fields and they're colliding with your automatic closing rules on old tickets, we recommend the following:

• Create a ticket type without these required for closing ticket custom fields.
  
• Go to the Helpdesk tab and filter on the ticket type with the required for closing fields, and based on the date up to the point where the new ticket custom fields were added.
  
• Using the selection box at the top left select all tickets that come out of this search.
  
• Go to Actions\Change\Change Type and set these tickets to the type without required for closing fields.
  
• The tickets can now be handled by either an auto-closing rule or can be manually closed en masse.