HaloITSM Guides

Documentation to assist with the setup and configuration of the HaloITSM platform

Guides > Parent and Child Tickets

Parent and Child Tickets

In this guide we will cover:

- What are Parent and Child Tickets?

- Identifying a Parent or Child Ticket

- Linking Tickets Manually

- Creating Child Tickets Automatically

- Actions between Parent and Child Tickets

- Child Ticket Behaviour when Merging Parent Tickets

- Adding Child Tickets into the Column Profile

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What are Parent and Child Tickets?

Parent and child tickets are a way of linking tickets together. Think of some tickets as A, B and C. If A is the parent ticket, you could link B and C to it as the children. A child ticket can only have one parent, but the parent can have multiple children.

The parent-to-child relationship can be used to delegate subtasks or link related issues.

Identifying a Parent or Child Ticket

There are a few indicators that a ticket is a parent or child. The first is in the ticket list, where the ID will either show with a "-P" or "-C" at the end for parent and child respectively.

Fig 1. Child and parent ticket on a ticket list.

When you click into a parent ticket, there will be a tab for "Child Tickets" with a count of the number in brackets.

Fig 2. Child Tickets tab on a parent ticket.

As of v2.184.1+, you can also hover over the three dots to "Toggle showing grandchild Tickets". This will choose whether tickets show that are the child ticket of the child, i.e. if we are looking at ticket A, and ticket B is the child, it will also show ticket C as the child of ticket B.

Fig 3. Toggle showing grandchild Tickets option.

On the child ticket, the "Ticket information" will show the "Parent ID" field with a hyperlink to the parent ticket.

Fig 4. Parent ID field on a child ticket.

Linking Tickets Manually

When viewing a ticket, you can create a parent-child relationship by hovering over the three dots in the top right corner. "Link to another Ticket" will make the ticket you are viewing the child of another, and you can also create actions with this as a system use, whereas "Link Tickets to this Ticket" will make this ticket the parent of others. Clicking either of these options will bring up a screen to select the ticket(s) from a list. This feature is useful if linking support tickets that come into your helpdesk to a major incident ticket.

Fig 5. Creating a parent-child relationship from existing tickets.

Within the ticket list, you can also use the checkbox > hover over "Edit" > "Link" to link tickets.

Fig 6. Link system use on a ticket list.

There are also action system uses for creating a parent or child ticket from another. When this system use is added to an action, a popup to create a new ticket will appear upon use.

Fig 7. Creating a new child ticket from an existing ticket.

Creating Child Tickets Automatically

Child tickets can be created automatically using ticket templates. The "Children" tab allows you to select which tickets are created. If no rules are set, they will be created immediately upon parent creation, but rules can be used to delay this until the criteria is met.

Templates of entity type "Child Template" are the only ones that will appear in the dropdown here.

Fig 8. Adding child templates to a ticket template.

Automatic creation can also be done in the workflow. Using the same system use with an template, this can then be made a quick action by enabling "Is a Quick Action" a little further down. Quick actions do not show the new action screen, and are completed automatically.

Fig 9. Creating a child ticket from an action.

This can then be automated on a certain step of the workflow, such as below where it will create the child ticket if the "Software" custom field is set to "Microsoft Project" at this stage.

Fig 10. Adding the action to a step in the workflow.

Actions between Parent and Child Tickets

Actions can be added and shown between parent and child tickets. Here is the system use "Add note to Child Ticket(s)".

Fig 11. Note on the parent ticket.

With the "Note" field added to the field list of the action, the text entered will then also be added to the children. There is also a "Add note to Parent Ticket" system use that does this the opposite way around. Both will only show on their respective tickets, i.e. actions with "Add note to Child Ticket(s)" will only show on a parent ticket.

Fig 12. Note added to the child ticket.

The action can also be set whether it appears on parent and/or child tickets. As of v2.182.1+, the "Show on Parent always"/"Show on Child always" setting in either of these dropdowns can be used to override the other one's "Don't show". This is for cases where a ticket is both a parent and a child.

The third option here is to set whether the action is added to parent/child tickets, available as of v2.182.1+.

Fig 13. Parent/child action settings.

If set differently, this overrides the global setting at the top here in Configuration > Tickets > General Settings. This is also where other parent-child behaviour can be set globally, such as requiring the "Advanced Ticket Details" agent permission to unlink tickets.

Fig 14. Global ticket configuration.

Child Ticket Behaviour when Merging Parent Tickets

As of v2.179.1+, the behaviour when merging a parent ticket can be set to determine what happens to its child tickets. By default, this is set to "Move Child Tickets to new Parent" but this can be set to close these either on the old or the new parent, delete them, or have a popup to ask every time. This is set in Configuration > Tickets > General Settings > Merging.

Fig 15. When merging a Parent Ticket, do the following with the Child Tickets.

Adding Child Tickets into the Column Profile

Column profiles can be configured to show the child ticket(s) of the parent in a dropdown arrow on the ticket list. In Configuration > Tickets > Views > Column Profiles > Configure Column Profiles, select the column profile you want to show the child ticket dropdown for. In the "Miscellaneous" section at the bottom, "Include Children" can be enabled.