Pressing Create New Ticket assigns a ticket number regardless of pressing Finish

[Łukasz Zemczak]

It seems that currently whenever the 'Create New Ticket' button is pressed, a ticket number is assigned to the given user regardless of whether the Finish button is pressed or not. This can potentially lead to unnecessary burnout of ticket numbers (which is not a big issue) and to loitering the local ticket board for the user (annoying). Each semi-created ticket like this sits in a limbo state and just eats up space as those cannot be easily removed or abandoned (no silo assigned, no info filled in). See here for an example:

https://bileto.ubuntu.com/#/active?landers=sil2100

At best Bileto shouldn't create a ticket in the database before the Finish button is pressed - since that's what that button is for actually.

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

It wasn't always this way, the current implementation was intended to solve two problems:

1. I was really annoyed by the fact that the web interface contained one UI for creating tickets and a separate UI for editing tickets. It felt very redundant and bad. Difficult to maintain, as if you ever want to add or change a db field you have to remember to give it both a creation UI and an edit UI.

2. Forensically, the audit logs did not contain the initial values of the fields, so when troubleshooting tickets it was sometimes difficult to tell what value a field had if it had never been edited since creation.

By eliminating the ticket creation UI, the result was that tickets would be created blank, and then adding the initial values would appear in the audit log because technically, the ticket always starts blank and then the "initial" values you type in are now edited in. This improved the completeness of the audit logs and reduced the amount of UI code to maintain.

So I'm definitely not going back to the old way, but we can explore options to fix the specific issues you're facing.

I'm not concerned about the "wasted ticket number" issue, because the db field storing those numbers is a postgres bigint which tops out at 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. Also, the "half created limbo tickets" can *always* be reused. If you need to create a new ticket there is no reason at all that you can't go grab one of your half created ones and re-use it. Bileto never prevents editing a ticket, even after it's landed or abandoned, so it's possible for you to continually reuse any ticket ever.

If you have one of these "limbo" tickets and you're really sure you want to abandon it instead of finish creating it, all you have to do is type at least one letter into the description and test_plan fields, save it, and then the abandon button appears, and it works even if there isn't a PPA created.

It sounds to me like you'd be satisfied if the abandon button appeared on a newly created ticket. I'm open to adding that in if that's what you want.

Let me know, thanks.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Bileto because there has been no activity for 60 days.]