Relationships

There are different ways in which Tickets can be related. All Relationships are summarized in the relationships display of each ticket, and can be modified in the "Relationships/Links" edit screen. The different relationships recognized by RT are:

merge	Two tickets can be about the SAME issue. If you find out about this, you can use the "Merge into" field in the "Relations" screen of the newer ticket to merge it into the older, pre-existing ticket. Be careful with this option, as it can only be undone using direct access to the RT database and not from the user interface, to fix the problem, on MySQL execute the following commands: delete from Links where Base like "%/ticket/NUMBER-OF-TICKET" update Tickets set EffectiveId = NUMBER-OF-TICKET where id = NUMBER-OF-TICKET
depends on/depends on by	A ticket can be depending on another ticket; /i.e./ the other ticket will need to be resolved before this ticket can be treated. This relationship can also be indicated in the "Relationships" setup. Please note that RT itself will not do anything with this information; it will just make it easier for humans to see the relationship. Please note that you only need to make the link in one direction. If you tell RT that ticket 5 depends on ticket 6, it will automatically enter the relation that ticket 6 is depended on by ticket 5.
parent/child	If for the completion of a ticket multiple people will need to take independent action, one way this can be treated is to make tickets for each of the actions, and label these new tickets as "Children" in the "Relationships" setup. Similar to the dependency relationship, RT will not enforce the relationship, and only one of the two directions of the relationship needs to be marked.
refers	A ticket can simply mention another ticket. It is also useful to insert non-RT links here for ticket reference (e.g. support articles).