Incident Cloning

There are many instances where you might need to resolve multiple instances of a single kind of incident, e.g., a defect that occurs in several different products or code branches. In these instances you want to track each instance of the incident as a distinct item because each instance will need to have its own audit trail, assignee, verification process, etc… However, the content, or issue definition may be identical. In addition, you will often want to have the incidents related so that it is easy to track all the instances together.

Visual Intercept’s new cloning feature, introduced in version 3.5.2, makes it simple to replicate and relate incidents. In both Visual Intercept and Visual Intercept Web you will see the Clone icon when you open an item such as an incident or contact. When you click on this icon, Visual Intercept will create a new incident or contact based on the content of the current document.

When you clone an item such as an incident you typically will not want the new incident to be an exact duplicate. For example, you will likely want to include related documents and descriptive information, but reset the history and related source code information. You might prefer to set other document values to a default value. In order to allow you to tailor the cloning process to suit your organization, Visual Intercept uses a template, which you can customize to determine how the incident is cloned. For the desktop product the template, viClone.xml, is located in the Template sub-directory of the Visual Intercept Enterprise installation directory. For Visual Intercept Web the template is located in the Profiles sub-directory of the web application directory.

By modifying the template you can do the following:

1. Specify that a particular value will be copied when an item is cloned.
2. Specify that a particular value will be set to a default value when an item is cloned.
3. Specify that a particular value will be set to nothing when an item is cloned.
4. If you are cloning an incident, you can specify that the cloned incident and the original incident are related and the relationship type.

The following example is the section of the template that determines how incidents are cloned. You will notice that not all of the incident data is represented by an XML tag. Any data that is not included in the template will be copied into the new items when an item is cloned. Elements such as <AssignedID></AssignedID>, which have a beginning and end tag, will be set to the value enclosed by the tags. The values included between tags can be either literal values or variables. In this example, the variable for project lead is used. The variables you can use are the same variables which are documented in the e-mail notification template located in the Visual Intercept Enterprise directory – isnotesv.tpl. Elements that have a beginning tag but no ending tag will set their values to nothing. Setting a value to nothing is useful for data that you don’t want to be copied during the cloning process, e.g., the incident history.

<viIncident>
<AssignedID>$LEADID</AssignedID>
<ReleaseName />
<ReleaseBuild />
<WorkStartDate />
<WorkFinishDate />
<Relationship>Same</Relationship>
<CrossRelationship>Same</CrossRelationship>
<CloneComment>This is a clone of $ID</CloneComment>
</viIncident>

Three special tags are the <CrossRelationship></CrossRelationship>, <Relationship></Relationship>, and <CloneComment></CloneComment> tags. Including the Relationship and CrossRelationship tags will determine whether the incidents are related and cross related in the cloning process. The value included in the related and cross related tags determines the relationship type. The clone comment tag allows you to append text or a value from a variable to the description of the clone.

By using the cloning capability you can streamline the process of tracking multiple instances of a single kind of issue, and by editing the template you can define a cloning process that is unique to your organization.

If you have other questions about issues not included in or beyond the scope of this Tech Tip, please contact Elsinore Technical Support Services at or 866.866.0034, option 2.