You can have one "control" field show/hide multiple "dependent" fields. This is literally our documentation's example: https://www.akeeba.com/documentation/ats-for-joomla/ticket-fields-conditional.html
> Secondly, is the best practice way of creating a custom-looking ticket to do an override and edit the PHP file? Do you have specific details about doing that? I noticed there is the potential to use templates. do you have any templates that we can use?
Doing a template override to customise the display of custom fields makes more sense in public content like articles, categories, contacts etc. It's not as useful for tickets. However, it's really up to you.If you want to create a template override you can. Template overrides are beyond the scope of the support we can provide. I can only provide some pointers.
I recommend reading the following Joomla Magazine articles which explain how you can customise the display of custom fields. This also works with ATS:
The fields are rendered by the file components/com_ats/tmpl/default_after_title.php, default_before_posts.php and default_after_posts.php — they are the $this->afterTitle, $this->beforeContent and $this->afterContent variables set in components/com_ats/src/View/Ticket/HtmlView.php depending on when each field is set up to display. If you do NOT render this content the default display of custom fields is not rendered either. You can instead access the collection of custom fields as $this->item->jcfields from your view template override.
> Thirdly, is there a way to integrate a progress bar for the stages of the ticket? so when a customer goes to my tickets page, there is a graphical representation? I have created an attachment
No. There is no intrinsic meaning to the ticket statuses nor any restriction about moving between statuses freely. Nothing prevents a ticket from going Open -> Stage 3 -> Closed -> Stage 2 -> Stage 1. Moreover, every time the client replies the ticket does go to Open automatically. What you are looking for is something that doesn't make sense including in a helpdesk component: a separate stage tracking and progress bar.
One way to do this is to have a custom field, editable only by your support staff, with a drop-down list of the stage the ticket resolution is in. You would then need a custom layout to render these options as a progress bar.
Another option is to fake it with a progress bar custom field (https://www.tassos.gr/joomla-extensions/advanced-custom-fields/docs/the-progress-bar-field) which you'd have to update manually as you're processing the ticket, again this field only being editable by the support staff.
What you can not and should not do is use the ticket status as a progress indicator since a. nothing prevents you from setting the ticket to any status at any given time and b. whenever the client replies the ticket becomes Open again.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
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