Akeeba Ticket System has full support for Joomla Fields in tickets. Before you start using them you need to keep in mind a few basic concepts.

Custom fields can be limited for editing in the backend, frontend or both sides of your site. This is controlled by the field's Editable In option. If you want your support staff or your clients to be able to change this field's value in the frontend of your site you need to set this option to Site or Both. If you want your backend support staff to also be able to edit this field's value you need to set this option to Both.

Custom fields are by default only editable by Super Users. This makes them kinda useless. Remember to go to the Permissions tab in each field and select which user groups can edit them by allowing the Edit Custom Field Value permission. This is an extremely powerful setting with a very interesting repercussion. You can make a field editable ONLY by clients, ONLY by support staff, neither or both! A field only editable by a client would be ideal for a privacy consent or NDA agreement field which needs to be legally guaranteed to be set only by the affected party (the client). A field only editable by the support staff would be ideal for implementing conditional fields. We will see example of these further down this documentation.

Read–only fields are, by default, visible in the ticket edit form in the frontend and backend of your site. You can hide these fields by setting the Display When Read–Only option of the field to No. This would be necessary for fields meant to be only accessed by your support staff or generally for fields you don't want to clutter the edit ticket interface, something which could overwhelm the client.

Fields have an access level which controls when they are displayed. This applies to rendering the field value (and also making it accessible through the ticket's jcfields property for template overrides) when displaying the posts of a ticket AND when editing a ticket. By default this is set to Public which means that everyone, including Guest users, can see the fields. Please note that Joomla CANNOT limit the display of custom fields only to ticket staff and the ticket owner i.e. it's impossible to implement Akeeba Ticket System's “Private” visibility. The best you can do is EITHER set the field's Access to a view access level which only includes the support staff OR set the ticket's Automatic Display to Do not automatically display. In the former case only support staff will see the custom field contents, even if the client can edit it. In the latter case neither will see the custom field contents unless they edit the ticket. This kind of limited display is great when asking for privileged information like server access details, social security numbers etc.

Fields can optionally belong to a Field Group. You can have as many field groups as you want. When submitting a new ticket or editing a ticket the fields are displayed per field group. Each field group renders a card (a bordered area within the form) whose title is the field group's title. If you have a field group description it will be displayed as an information message below the group's title and before any fields. This is a convenient way to include a brief explanation of why you are asking for this information and/or short instructions for filling out the fields in the group.

Finally, fields can be assigned to one or more ATS categories. The default is All which means that the custom field appears in all ATS categories. You can change that so only the most pertinent fields appear in each category. Please note that field groups cannot be assigned in a category. However, empty field groups ARE NOT displayed.

Conditional fields — Joomla 4.3

If you are using Joomla 4.3 or any later version, rejoice! Joomla supports conditional fields, i.e. displaying a field based on the value of another field.

When setting up a field go to its Options tab and set the display condition in the Showon Attribute option. This feature is handled by Joomla itself. The format of this option's contents and how it works can be found in the Joomla Showon documentation page. Please remember that you need to use the field names, not titles or labels, in the Showon Attribute field.

If you have already set up conditional custom fields in Akeeba Ticket System using Joomla 4.0–4.2 on your site you will need to migrate them to the new format. Here's what to do:

Please note that the Content – Akeeba Ticket System Custom Fields Show–on Behavior plugin will be removed around September or October 2023 when we remove support for Joomla 4.2 in our software.

Conditional fields — Joomla 4.0 to 4.2 inclusive

By default, Joomla fields in Joomla 4.2 and earlier do not allow you to display them conditionally i.e. based on the value of another field. We found this to be rather limiting. We addressed this shortcoming with the Content – Akeeba Ticket System Custom Fields Show–on Behavior plugin. This plugin is installed and enabled by default when you install Akeeba Ticket System.

The plugin adds a new option in the General tab of the fields you define in Akeeba Ticket System only. It does not apply to fields defined for any other component, including the build–in Joomla components such as Articles, Banners, Contacts etc.

The plugin merely exposes to you a built–in Joomla feature. That's right, Joomla 4.0–4.2 already has a “show on” behavior, it just doesn't expose it for custom fields. The format of this option's contents and how it works can be found in the Joomla Showon documentation page. Please remember that you need to use the field names, not titles or labels, in the Show On field.

For example, if you have a List custom field with the name showme and you want to make another field display only when the showme field is set to 1 you need to enter the following Show On option value in the other field showme:1. We will see a practical example of this in the conditional fields tutorial further below.

Fields in template overrides

If you want to use custom fields in view template overrides just remember that the ticket object has the same jcfields property you get in Joomla core articles. This property includes the field values of all fields which would be visible to the user regardless of their Automatic Display setting i.e. it includes fields whose Automatic Display is set to Do Not Display.

For those of you implementing view template overrides we have added a handy dandy helper to make your life managing fields much easier. Joomla keys the jcfields array by field ID which is cumbersome and practically unusable — you typically want to get a custom field by name. To help with that we implemented the getFieldsByName helper.

If you have the ticket in a variable named $ticket and you want to get the information for a field called example on this ticket all you need to do is $exampleField = $this->getFieldsByName($ticket, 'example'); . This returns the object with the field information and value. The raw field value is accessible as $exampleField->rawvalue whereas the fully rendered HTML of the field display is accessible as $exampleField->value.

If the field you are looking for does not exist the field helper will return null.

If you want to get the entire jcfields array keyed by the field name instead of the field ID you just need to omit the second parameter. For example: $allFields = $this->getFieldsByName($ticket);.

So, if you want to display the rendered version of a field named video only when the custom field with the name showVideo is set to 1 you can do this in your template override:

<?php if ($this->getFieldsByName($ticket, 'showVideo')->rawvalue == 1) {
  echo $this->getFieldsByName($ticket, 'video')->value;
} ?>

To make it more safe, checking if both fields are defined before using them, you can do the following:

<?php 
$customFields = $this->getFieldsByName($ticket);

if (($customFields['showVideo'] ?? null) && ($customFields['video'] ?? null) 
  && $customFields['showVideo']->rawvalue == 1) {
    echo $customFields['video']->value;
} ?>