Recent Trail

Recent — getting back to what you were doing

You are reading a ticket. Something in it sends you off to Knowledge to check an article, then into Assets to look up the machine. Five minutes later you want the ticket back — and you cannot remember its number.

Recent is the answer to that. It lives in the waffle menu, the grid of squares at the top left that you already use to leave a module, so the control you left through is the one you come back through.

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Opening it

Click the waffle button, then the Recent tab beside Modules.

On a phone it is the same drawer that slides in from the left, with the same two tabs. Nothing about it is desktop-only.

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What you see

Not a list of pages. A list of things — TICKET-000110, APPSVR01, a knowledge article by its title — grouped under the module you were in when you opened them, the way headings and body text sit in a word processor:

▾ Tickets                                 09:41
      TICKET-000108  Excel string sorting     09:41
      TICKET-000109  Bug fixing               09:35
      TICKET-000110  Google Workspace invoice 09:31

▸ Knowledge                               09:28
      Developer Workstation Setup Guide

▸ Tickets                                 09:14
      TICKET-000104  Test PDF attachment

Read that from the bottom up and it is a picture of your morning. You were in tickets, you stepped out to Knowledge for an article, you came back.

Note the two separate Tickets headings. Coming back to a module opens a new heading rather than quietly adding to the old one — that repetition is the point. It shows why those three tickets were open together: they were one piece of work.

Click any row to go straight back to that record. Click a heading to fold it away or open it again.

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The details worth knowing

It is yours, not your browser's. The trail is stored against your account, so it survives signing out, closing the browser and moving to another machine. Sign in on a laptop at home and this morning's trail is there.

There is nothing to manage. No opening, closing, pinning or tidying. It fills itself in as you work, keeps roughly your last 250 records, and forgets anything older than two months.

Only the newest group is open. Everything above it is folded, so the pane stays short. That is deliberate — the fastest way back to what you were just doing should be one click, not a scroll.

Opening the same record twice in a row is one line, not two. Refreshing a ticket, or reading a long one over ten minutes, does not fill the trail with copies. But open something else in between and coming back really is a second visit, so it gets its own line.

Arriving at a module is not a visit. Opening the Tickets inbox records nothing by itself. A record has to be opened.

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Searching your trail

There is a search box pinned along the bottom of the pane. Type into it and the trail filters as you go, matching on the names of the records — headings with a match stay and open themselves, the rest disappear. Clear the box and everything returns as it was.

This searches your trail only. To search every record in FreeITSM, use the command palette — ⌘K or Ctrl-K — which is what that is for. The trail is the smaller, more useful question: what was I looking at last Tuesday?

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What it covers

Tickets, tasks, problems, changes, assets, CMDB items, knowledge articles and contracts.

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Who sees what

The trail is re-checked against your permissions every time you open it, not when the record was visited. So:

• A record you could open on Monday and cannot open on Wednesday is simply not there on Wednesday.
• A record that has since been deleted disappears too, rather than leaving a row that goes nowhere.
• If everything under a heading has gone, the heading goes with it. You never see an empty dated group, because that would quietly tell you something had been there.

Nobody can see anybody else's trail.

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Where it came from

This grew out of discussion #124, which asked for browser-style tabs inside FreeITSM. Those were declined, for three reasons worth stating plainly: the browser already does tabs better than we would (Ctrl-click, tab groups, session restore, all free); a strip of tabs along the top is a desktop-only idea, and the modules were just made to work at 360px; and FreeITSM's 91 server-rendered pages cannot carry real internal tabs without becoming something else entirely.

What survived was the sentence underneath the request — help people get back to what they were doing when they jump out into another module — and that is what this is.

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Setting up

Nothing. It is on for every analyst. An installation upgrading to it needs one run of System → Database Verification to create the table it stores the trail in.

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Developers: see Recent trail — Developer Guide.