How can I change the ticket masks to a different format?

Ticket masks obscure your internal ticket IDs. This is important because:

• Market competitors can measure your helpdesk e-mail volume by sending you e-mail every couple days and plotting how many other messages have been generated.
• Your community tools are more secure if your internal IDs aren't provided. It's a lot harder to guess a random mask (with ~1.38 trillion combinations by default) than to simply add or subtract from a known valid ID.
• Masks are portable. Ticket masks allow so many combinations to reference a ticket that you have a fair assurance of uniqueness when you combine multiple helpdesks into one or perform imports. A good example of this is moving tickets from Cerberus Helpdesk 3.x to 4.0. If you did any evaluation testing in 4.0 then your internal ticket IDs will likely have consumed some IDs that were used by your original data. This means any original tickets that you import will end up with a different internal ID than they used to have. This shouldn't matter unless you're giving that ID to customers as a reference (which by now we hope you understand is a bad idea!).

As long as your preferred ticket mask format can guarantee a fair amount of uniqueness on generation, meaning multiple masks can be tried until a unique one is found, then you can change the ticket mask format to anything you like.

In the file cerb4/api/Application.class.php, near line 247, you will find:
static function generateTicketMask($pattern = "CCC-CCCCC") {

$pattern is the format of the ticket mask. You can use the following tokens:

L - Random letter
N - Random number
C - Random letter or number
Y - Current year (4-digit)
M - Current month (01-12)
D - Current Day (01-31)

It's important to re-state that your ticket mask pattern should have an amount of randomness to it. Your helpdesk may receive a lot of mail in a very short time period, so purely date-driven masks won't be sufficient.

There's also another caveat: Make sure your ticket mask doesn't produce an entirely numeric number (i.e., without dashes, etc). The helpdesk can use internal IDs and masks interchangeably on most functionality, so if your mask looks like an ID you will run into trouble.

It's possible for support for more pattern tokens to be added, you can make suggestions from the project portal.

Forward-compatibility notice: This process may become a configuration setting from the GUI in a future update. It will depend on how often people seek to change the default mask pattern.

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