Tree Multiselect fields are `NULL` initially, preventing matching in e.g. Overviews

Technical assistance
1

Infos:

  • Used Zammad version: 7.1.3
  • Used Zammad installation type: docker-compose

Expected behavior:

  • New tickets created by an incoming email behave exactly like tickets without an assigned value in a tree multiselect (other selector kinds not tested) filters (matching “contains all not”/“contains one not”, not matching “contains all”/“contains one”).

Actual behavior:

  • No filter matches. This includes wrapping a NOT around the condition (e.g. NOT(contains-one(my-value))). This means that any e.g. overview using a filter on such a select will not show that ticket, regardless of the specific filter (unless they are included using a different path of an OR, independent of the tree multiselect field).

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

  • Add a tree multiselect to your ticket object.
  • Add an email address that creates a ticket when it receives a mail. It might break in other scenarios as well, but we only tested it with mails.
  • Write an email that opens a ticket.
  • Observe that it does not match any condition as described in “Actual behavior”.

Further information

  • Changing the tree multiselect once and then clearing it again in UI fixes the behaviour.
  • In the database, new tickets have the value NULL in the field of the tree multiselect (i.e. SELECT * FROM tickets WHERE my_tree_multiselect IS NULL; finds those tickets). Tickets that were manually assigned to no value via the UI contain the string {} instead (i.e. SELECT * FROM tickets WHERE my_tree_multiselect = '{}'; finds those tickets).
2

What’s this supposed to do? What’s the use case?

3

Suppose I want to have an Overview showing all Tickets that do not have a specific value set in their tree multiselect. For example, I have a field depicting the type of request that my customer sent in. I want to have an Overview where all Tickets except those marked as “Waiting for funding” in that request-type-field are listed. This will, however, not include Tickets that were just created for the reasons mentioned in my original post, but I want those Tickets to be included as well.

4

gotcha, i believe Zammad is supposed to work exactly this way.

You have 2 options in my opinion:
A) set a default in your multiselect
B) set a trigger to change your multiselect value whenever a ticket gets created - this way you can define the right value based on the customer/group/org/etc