Does anyone know of a way to export the trouble tickets and resolutions from xHelp into SmartFAQ or some other Knowledge Base system?

The data we are begining to collect through our Help Desk (xHelp) is very useful for our domain, and I'd like to find a way to export this data to SmartFAQ without needing to manually copy and paste the data over.

I'm not a MySQL or PHP guru, so if you suggest a table join, or something like that, would you please provide the proper syntax.

Thanks a million!

JMorris

Looking through phpMyAdmin, I see the fields I'd like to "join", but I'm clueless on how to do it.

Here's the relevent fields
in xoops_xhelp_tickets:
id | subject | description | department

in xoops_xhelp_responses
id | ticketid | message

in xoops_smartfaq_answers:
answerid | status | faqid | answer | notifypub

So, from xoops_xhelp_tickets >> xoops_smartfaq_answers (To create the questions) then from xoops_xhelp_responses >> xoops_smartfaq_answers (create the answers and publish). It looks like I would just have to duplicate the xHelp departments in SmartFAQ categories.

I'm sure this is something that's probably pretty simple for someone who knows MySQL, but that's the catch, I don't know MySQL syntax yet.

Thanks again!

Hi !

For sure, an export function from xHelp to SmartFAQ would be great ! In fact, this has been in the air for quite a while now . And if I'm not mistaken, the xHelp team plan to do somethig about it.

The important thing here is to develop a class betweern both module that would not be affected (or the least pssible) by the ugrade of both modules.

I think the first step would be to discuss with the xHelp team to see if they plan to do that in a near futur. If they are, there is no point (IMO) to develop this ourselves.

I'll send a mail to ackbar to have his thought on the subject.

Cheers !

@JMorris - as Marcan has said, we were discussing this and it is up in the air. We haven't really talked about it lately. I will talk to Ackbarr when he gets back to his desk (we are having some server problems at work today).

A couple of clarifications:

First - there is an existing feature request in xHelp for exactly what you are asking about:

xhelp Feature Request #1138: FAQ / KB integration. I plan on something more robust than just a sql join. Like something that adds actions to an existing ticket allowing a staff member create a new faq entry directly from the ticket.

Second - current plans: We are finishing up release v 0.75, if I can ever get my custom field code done. And xhelp / FAQ integration plans would start with v 0.8, but as there are several large features planned for v 0.8, it might be a couple months before those features are fleshed out. We've talked about breaking v 0.8 into a couple smaller releases so that we could keep getting new releases out in a timely manner, but I haven't made a final decision on that yet.

Third - implementation ideas. I have gone back and forth on this. Thinking about things like a general plugin interface for xhelp, or maybe using web services (probably soap) to handle the data interchange, or a combination of both.

We have already started to explore both ideas. I have a mostly finished plugin spec checked into CVS, and there is a partially finished SOAP server (using PEAR_SOAP) that eric was working on.

Fourth - development issues to solve. Tying the plugin system (which is based on an events callback system) into the rendering layer (smarty) in a general way. Maybe the answer here is to create a class of plugin, say FAQ Plugin and check if any FAQ Plugin is enabled. If so display additional actions (as specified by the plugin). Or maybe make the ticket actions list something that is controlled programmatically, which might be more flexible in the long run.