Ticket Folder Pane - edmozley/freeitsm GitHub Wiki

The folder pane

The left-hand panel in Tickets → Inbox. It is how you narrow a few hundred tickets down to the handful you are actually going to work on, and it does more than it looks like it does.

Group by department, team or analyst

At the top sit the grouping buttons: Department, Team and Analyst. They change what the middle of the list is made of. Team only appears once your install has teams.


Department	One folder per active department — IT Support, Infrastructure, Development. The usual view when work is owned by a team.
Team	One folder per team, for work routed to a team rather than to a person.
Analyst	One folder per analyst, showing what each person is carrying. The usual view when you are running the desk rather than working it. Your own folder is pinned to the top as My tickets.

The choice is yours alone. It is remembered against your account, so switching does not change what anybody else sees, and it survives signing out.

To see only your own tickets, or to hide closed ones, in any grouping, use the filter button above the list - see Just my tickets, or no closed ones.

Every folder counts, and every folder opens

Each folder shows how many tickets are in it, and clicking one opens it to reveal a count per status:

IT Support (32)
   Open (24)
   In Progress (4)
   On Hold (1)
   Awaiting Response (3)
   Closed (0)
   Resolved (0)

Click the folder to see everything in it; click a status underneath to narrow to just those. A status with nothing in it is greyed rather than hidden, so the shape of the list stays the same as you move about and you can see at a glance that nothing is on hold.

The statuses are your statuses. They come from whatever you have configured under Tickets → Settings → Statuses, in your display order, so an install using In Analysis and Waiting for Vendor sees exactly those.

Opening a folder never changes what you are looking at. Click IT Support and you get IT Support's tickets, whether the list of statuses underneath is open or shut.

The four fixed folders

Above and below the group folders are four that are always there.

All Tickets

Everything you have access to, and the view most people leave open. It expands like any other folder, giving you a status count across the entire desk — which is the quickest way to answer "how much of this is actually still open?" without filtering anything.

Unassigned

Work nobody has picked up. It expands too, and this one is worth understanding properly, because what it means follows the grouping you have chosen:

Grouped by	Unassigned means	Typical use
Department	No department has been set	Triage: mail that arrived and has not been filed
Team	No team has been set	Work not yet routed to a team
Analyst	Nobody is working on it	The pile to hand out at a stand-up

These are genuinely different sets — a ticket can be filed to IT Support and still have nobody working on it — so the counts underneath change when you flip the toggle. That is deliberate, not a glitch.

Snoozed

Tickets that have left the queue until a time you chose. They are not in All Tickets, not in their department, and not in anyone's analyst folder — a snoozed ticket has genuinely gone away. See Snoozing tickets.

Trash

Deleted tickets, kept and restorable. Also excluded from every other folder. See Selecting several tickets for bulk deletion.

Drag a ticket onto a folder

You can drag tickets from the list onto folders in the pane, and where you drop decides what changes.

Drop onto	What it does
A department	Files it to that department
An analyst	Assigns it to that person
A status under a department	Files it and sets the status, in one move
A status under an analyst	Assigns it and sets the status
A team	Gives it to that team. The analyst is left as it was
A status under a team	Gives it to the team and sets the status
A status under All Tickets	Sets the status only — nothing else is touched
A status under Unassigned	Unassigns it and sets the status
Unassigned	Clears the department, the team or the analyst, depending on the grouping
Trash	Deletes it (restorable)

Two things worth knowing:

Dragging a selected ticket drags the whole selection. If you have ticked five tickets and drag one of them, all five move. Dragging a ticket that is not part of the selection collapses the selection to that one first, so you can never move a set you thought you had deselected.

Hovering over a closed folder opens it. Hold a dragged ticket over a department, a team, an analyst or Unassigned for a moment and it expands, so you can drop onto a status without letting go first.

Every change made by dragging is written to the ticket's history exactly as if you had used the dropdowns.

What the counts do and do not include

Trashed and snoozed tickets are excluded from every ordinary folder — they are counted only in their own.
Counts follow your teams. If you are in a team, the pane shows that team's departments and every number counts those departments, plus every ticket with no department, plus anything assigned to you. A team with no departments counts only the tickets with no department - System → Teams flags a team like that.
Analyst folders follow your company. On an install with more than one company, the Analyst grouping lists only analysts who can work in the company you are viewing (plus you, and anyone with tickets there).
On a multi-company install, everything is scoped to the company you are currently in.
The counts follow the filter. With Mine or Hide closed on, every number in the pane is narrowed the same way as the list.
The numbers under a folder add up to the number on it. They are counted the same way as the total above them rather than by a separate rule that could drift.
Merged tickets are not counted. When one ticket is merged into another the loser is kept so its number goes on working, but it is no longer a job in a queue and does not appear in any folder.
A ticket with no email still counts, and still shows. Most tickets arrive as an email, but not all do, and the ones that do not are listed exactly like the rest.

The counts and the list used to be able to disagree — a folder could say 99 and list 96. That turned out to be two separate faults and both are fixed, so if you ever see a badge that does not match the list beneath it, that is worth reporting.