Bulk Actions - edmozley/freeitsm GitHub Wiki

Selecting several tickets (bulk actions)

Some jobs are not one ticket at a time. Forty auto-generated alerts need closing, a departing analyst's queue needs reassigning, a morning's worth of misrouted email needs moving to the right department.

The FreeITSM inbox lets you select as many tickets as you like and act on all of them at once — using the same Ctrl and Shift keys you already use in Outlook, File Explorer and every mail client you've ever touched.

There are no checkboxes. A checkbox column would cost space on every row, forever, to serve the occasional case — and it trains you to reach for the mouse when the keyboard is quicker.

Selecting with the mouse

Do this	And you get
Click a ticket	Just that one selected, opened in the reading pane — exactly as before
Ctrl+click	Adds that ticket to the selection, or removes it if it was already in. Everything else stays as it was
Shift+click	Selects the whole block from where you last plain-clicked, down (or up) to where you just clicked
Ctrl+Shift+click	Adds a whole block without throwing away what you had already picked

💡 Plain click always starts again. Once you've built up a selection, an ordinary click with no keys held clears the lot and leaves you with just the ticket you clicked. That's your escape hatch if a selection gets away from you.

The bit that makes it feel right

Shift measures from the last ticket you plain-clicked — the anchor — not from the last row you happened to touch. So if you click ticket 3, Shift+click ticket 9, then decide that's too many and Shift+click ticket 6, you get 3 to 6. The block shrinks. It doesn't leave you stuck with 3 to 9 and force you to start over.

Ctrl+click moves the anchor to itself, so a Ctrl+click followed by a Shift+click measures from the ticket you Ctrl+clicked.

On a Mac, ⌘ does the same job as Ctrl.

Selecting with the keyboard

You never have to touch the mouse:

Key	Does
↑ / ↓	Move to the next ticket and select it (opening it, like a click)
Shift + ↑ / ↓	Extend the block from the anchor
Ctrl + ↑ / ↓	Move the cursor up and down without changing what's selected
Space	Add or remove the ticket the cursor is sitting on
Ctrl + A	Select every ticket currently listed
Escape	Clear the selection

Ctrl+arrows plus Space is the keyboard's Ctrl+click — it's how you build a scattered selection of the 2nd, 7th and 15th ticket without a mouse. The cursor is drawn as an outline rather than a fill, so you can always tell "the cursor is here" apart from "this one is chosen".

Typing in the search box, a reply, or any dialog? None of these shortcuts fire — the inbox only listens when you're actually working the list.

Acting on the selection

Right-click — the full menu

Right-click any selected ticket and the usual menu appears, but now headed "5 tickets selected" and applying to all of them:

Set status — close forty alerts in two clicks
Set priority
Set department — the misrouted-email fix
Set type
Assign to — hand a queue over to a colleague

⚠️ Right-clicking a ticket that is not in your selection throws the selection away and targets just that ticket. This is deliberate, and it's how Outlook behaves — it means you can never act on a set you thought you'd moved on from. If you meant to act on the group, right-click one of the highlighted ones.

Drag them

Dragging any selected ticket drags the whole selection. Drop them on a department, an analyst, a status folder, or on Trash. While you drag you'll see a small stack of pages with a count on it, so it's obvious you're carrying twelve tickets and not the one under the pointer.

The buttons

Whichever on-screen surface you've chosen (see below) carries Assign, Status, Priority, Department and Delete buttons, for when you'd rather not right-click.

Deleting

Delete asks first, naming the count — "Move 12 tickets to the trash?" — and it's the same soft delete as deleting one ticket, so everything lands in Trash and can be restored. Dragging onto Trash does the same thing without the extra prompt, since dragging to a bin is already a deliberate act.

Choosing what the screen does

When you select several tickets, the reading pane can't show a single ticket any more. There's no one right answer to what should happen, so it's your choice — set it in the account menu → Preferences, under Selecting several tickets.

Summary panel (the default)

The reading pane becomes a list of exactly what you've picked — reference and subject for each — with the bulk actions underneath. What you're about to act on is on screen, and the actions are findable without knowing to right-click.

Keep the ticket open

The reading pane carries on showing the ticket you first opened, with an amber strip across the top reminding you that an action will apply to all of them. Good if you want to read one while collecting others; the warning is there because a pane showing one ticket while an action hits five is exactly the mistake worth flagging.

Bar above the list

A compact strip appears directly above the ticket list with the count and the actions, keeping them next to the rows they affect. The reading pane is left alone.

All three offer the same actions — only the position changes. Switch whenever you like; it applies the next time you open the inbox.

Good to know

Progress is shown while it runs. A large selection is applied in batches, and the surface counts up ("Setting status — 50/120") so a long run doesn't look like a hang.
One failure doesn't abandon the rest. If a ticket can't be changed — someone else deleted it, say — the others still apply and you're told exactly how many failed. A partial run is never reported as a success.
Every ticket is audited individually, with its own real previous value. A bulk change leaves the same trail as making each change by hand, so the ticket history doesn't become vaguer just because you were efficient.
Everything else still happens. SLA clocks, notification emails, CSAT and Workflows triggers all behave exactly as they do when you change one ticket.
Selecting is per-view. Changing folder or refreshing clears tickets that are no longer listed out of the selection — acting on a ticket you can't see is worse than losing it from the set.

Where it isn't

Desktop only. Phones and tablets have no Ctrl or Shift key, so multi-select doesn't apply there. Nothing changes for touch users — tapping a ticket opens it exactly as it always did. See Mobile-Friendly.
The main inbox list. The pop-out full-screen ticket view doesn't have it.
Up to 100 tickets per batch are sent at a time (larger selections are automatically split), which also caps how much one mistaken click can do.
Ticket subject is not bulk-editable — deliberately. Fields that are meaningful per ticket shouldn't be set fifty at a time.