Splitting Tickets

Splitting tickets

"My printer is offline… oh, and while I've got you, my monitor keeps flickering."

That is two pieces of work sharing one ticket — one SLA clock, one status, one owner — and whichever gets fixed second looks late. Splitting moves the unrelated messages onto a ticket of their own.

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Doing a split

1. Open the ticket and find a message that belongs to the new problem.
2. On that message's header line, click ⑂ Split — or right-click the message header.
3. Tick the messages that belong on the new ticket, give it a subject, and click Split.

The Split control is on the message header (the "Received / Sarah Hall — 21 Jul 12:00" line), not the ticket toolbar. Splitting starts from a message, so the control lives on one. Right-clicking the message body still gives you the normal browser menu, because copying text out of messages matters more than saving a click.

What moves

The dialog is a checklist of every message on the ticket. The one you opened it from is ticked to start with; tick or untick any others until exactly the messages belonging to the new problem are selected — they do not have to be next to each other. A running "N messages selected" count sits above the list.

Three shortcuts save clicks:

• This and newer — ticks the message you opened from plus everything later in the conversation. This is the old default, for the common case where the topic changed and never changed back.
• All / Clear — select everything or nothing, to build a selection from either end.

Whatever is ticked is exactly what moves — the server moves those messages and no others.

⚠️ "Newer" means later in time. The conversation is displayed newest-first, so those messages appear above the one you clicked, not below. The wording says "newer" rather than "after" for precisely this reason.

The messages move, they are not copied. A copy would leave the same customer message on two tickets for two people to answer. The original keeps a marker in the conversation — "3 messages moved to ticket ABC-123-45678" — sitting exactly in the gap they left, so the thread never silently jumps from Tuesday to Friday.

The new ticket

It inherits the requester, company, department and type — same person, same context, different problem — and starts at your first open status, because the new work is by definition unfinished even if the original had been resolved.

Give it a proper subject. The box defaults to the moved message's subject, which is usually a RE: of the old problem. "Monitor flickering at desk 14" is worth ten seconds of typing.

Both tickets stay open and are linked as Related — not Duplicate-of, because they are about genuinely different things. Each carries a banner pointing at the other.

Undoing a split

Split at the wrong message? The original ticket's banner offers Undo split: the messages come straight back, the marker disappears, and the ticket that was created goes to the trash.

It refuses if anybody has worked on the new ticket. If someone has replied on it, added a note or logged time against it, the undo is declined with an explanation naming exactly what is in the way:

"There is 1 newer message on MOF-818-03148 — undoing would drag it back onto the original ticket"

That reply was written to a different ticket, about a different problem. Dragging it back would not be a reversal, it would be a second mistake. Deal with whatever is in the way first, or leave the split as it stands.

Splits made before FreeITSM started recording which messages moved cannot be undone automatically.

What splitting will not do

• It will not move every message. That would leave the original an empty shell still holding the reference your customer has. If that is what you want, you want a merge. (A "moved to…" marker left by an earlier split doesn't count as a message you can keep — the checklist doesn't offer it.)
• Notes stay put — only messages move, for now.
• Tickets in the trash, or already merged away, cannot be split.

See also

• Merging tickets — the opposite job, for when two tickets are the same thing
• Splitting Tickets — Developer Guide — how it works under the hood
• Linking tickets — for when tickets are related but should stay separate
• Tickets — the inbox this lives in