Q: How to I change the Owner of a Request Tracker ticket?

• How do I reassign a ticket from one person to another in RT?
• What does the error message "You can only reassign tickets that you own or that are unowned" mean?

Context

• Request Tracker (RT version 4) running on help.mit.edu
• Staff working on tickets in a queue in which they have ticket ownership permissions

Answer

By default, staff working in a queue are granted all of them, but queue administrators may choose to further restrict permissions. In that case, you may get a permission error trying to perform some of these steps. You should contact your queue administrator to follow up.

Ownership permissions in RT4

This answer assumes that you have all the various ownership permissions in the queue you are working in. The following ticket ownership-related permissions exist in RT4. By default staff working on tickets are granted all of them. Sometimes queue administrators may choose to remove ownership permissions granted by default. Most commonly this applies to the "Steal Ticket" permission, if your team's workflow does not favor someone taking a ticket away from someone else, but restricts that action to supervisors.

How to change the Owner of a Ticket

1. If the ticket is currently not owned by anyone

The Owner field will be empty or read "Nobody". This is the simplest case. To change the owner of such a ticket, you can simply enter a new owner into the owner field on any of the following ticket-related screens: Call Center, People, Reply, Comment, and Jumbo.

2. If the ticket is currently owned by you

The owner field will display your name or your username. To change the owner clear your name from the owner field, and type in or select from the popup menu the name of the new owner on any of the following ticket-related screens: Call Center, People, Reply, Comment, and Jumbo.

3. If the ticket is currently owned by someone else

This is where most folks run into problems, if they do at all. RT4's built-in workflow does not allow you to change the owner of a ticket from User A to User B if you are neither User A nor User B. You can only change the owner of a ticket that is not owned by anyone, or that is owned by you. So there's an extra step required for such a ticket:

1. Go to the Actions menu on the ticket and select Steal
   Result: The ticket is now owned by you

Once the ticket is owned by you, you can change the owner as above, by entering a new owner into the owner field on any of the following ticket-related screens: Call Center, People, Reply, Comment, and Jumbo. If you don't steal the ticket first and try to change its owner you will see this error message:

4. Special case: Unassign the ticket

If the ticket is currently assigned to you and you want to change the owner back to nobody, simply type Nobody into the Owner field just as you would normally assign a new owner, or pick Nobody from the Owner popup.

Notes

• Whether you can type an owner into a text field (with auto-complete) or see a popup menu is controlled by your personal settings in RT via Logged in as... > Settings > Options
• The special owner Nobody can display as Nobody or Nobody in particular in the popup menu

See also

• How do I assign an Owner to a ticket in RT4?
• Things to Know When Getting Started with Request Tracker (RT) 4.0
• [archive:Request Tracker (RT) 4.0 Upgrade]
• RT 4.0 Articles