Allow a customer to create an Insight object (or alternative)

Question

For a use case I currently have I'm looking for way to have customer dynamically input a set of data.

e.g. (fictional):

A customer creates a Request (from the portal) and needs to enter a undefined amount of boxes. These boxes have several properties (such as weight, height, depth,... )

Now I could "ask" the user how many boxes he wants to create and based on that pre-define a number of fields (multiple fields to make sure each property can be entered) and show/hide the fields with a Scriptrunner behaviour.

Now the Cons here are that I need to pre-create those fields and I'm limited by a fixed amount of "boxes" I want to let the user create in a single request.

Hence my idea was to create an Object scheme in Insight with an object type "Box". This "box" would then have a couple of attributes which are the properties of my box.

The customer would then (through an insight custom field) be allowed to create/modify objects within this schema (but with a filter that they only see objects created by them).

Now I don't see a method

* of allowing a customer to create objects within a schema
* a way to filter the insight objects based on the request they are creating

Anybody got some ideas or alternative to handle this use case? The essence would be to have a user dynamically create objects without having a fixed amount before the user starts.

Thomas WERNHER · Answer

Hi, i don't know if this might help, but here's a use case i've done at work. When new hardware is coming, they often have boxes with multiple items of the same sort. i.e. computer screen of the same brand and manufacturer, same caracteristics and so on (computers, etc.). 
so, i've isolated the caracteristics that will need to be repeated and the ones that will be unique (i.e. serial number and unique barcode). I ask them to fill 1 line per SN / BC pair with a separator in a multiline texte field.
then, in an insight groovy script in the transition, i load all the infos, and for the non unique values, i loop and create the objects.
works well. the max we created in 1 shot was 200 hardware objects

Dirk Ronsmans · Answer

Hi @David Sumlin ,

It's indeed not an easy one :)

The thing is i don't want the Request creation to trigger some Insight object creation, but the user would actually need to create the Insight objects as part of their Request creation (basically on the fly/ad-hoc object creation as input to their request).

I did hear back from a support ticket launched at Atlassian/Mindville and it seems it's just not possible to allow a customer to create Insight Objects thru the portal. (they have a suggestion request for it)

https://jira.mindville.com/browse/ICS-563

So for now we'll have to stick with creating 50 (10 items and 5 fields or properties/item fields and resort to behaviors to show/hide/clear the fields based upon a "amount of items" selection.

Thanks for thinking with me tho :)  Seems I'm trying to do a bit too exotic things.

An alternative might be to get Proforma, it would still be something pre-defined but that addon doesn't create the fields as custom fields but rather in the app itself.. gotta think about that one.

David Sumlin · Answer

Dirk, doing #1 efficiently is...difficult. Creating a single object from a request based on some fields isn't difficult, but creating multiple objects from a single request using the portal....I'm not sure that's possible, at least without using an addon. It's the same old issue of trying to capture one-to-many items within a JSM request. (look ma, I used the new acronym!) One addon that comes to mind might be the Table Grid Next Generation to capture the box info, and then a post function using Groovy Scripting to create the objects.

#2 is easier in that you can configure the Issue Filter Scope (IQL) setting of an Insight field to only show objects where the customer created them. (obviously, you'd have to make sure that there's an attribute on the objects which identifies the creator)