Clone Ticket: GLPI Plugin

This plugin lets you send a GLPI ticket to another entity with one click, without dragging along a category, technician, or location that doesn't actually make sense once the ticket lands somewhere else.

Why this exists

If you run GLPI across several entities (an MSP with a separate entity per customer, or a large organisation split into departments), you've probably needed to copy a ticket from one entity to another. The obvious way to do that is to clone the row and change entities_id. The problem is that a ticket which is perfectly valid in Entity A can reference things that don't exist, or shouldn't be visible, in Entity B: a category tree scoped to A, a technician who has no rights in B, a location that only makes sense in A.

This plugin checks each of those references against the destination entity before creating the new ticket, instead of copying them blindly. If a value is genuinely valid there (because it's shared, or recursive from a parent entity both sides can see), it's kept. If it isn't, it's left off, and the destination ticket is created without it rather than pointing at something broken.

What it does

• Adds a "Propagate to entity" button on every ticket form.
• Opens a modal where you pick one or more destination entities.
• Shows a preview for each destination as soon as you pick it: category, location, requester, assignee, observer, and group, each marked kept or cleared with a reason, before you commit to anything.
• Creates the ticket in each destination entity through GLPI's normal ticket creation path, so that entity's own rules (SLA assignment, business rules, and so on) get to run instead of being skipped.
• Checks category, location, requester, assignee, observer, and assigned group against each destination entity before deciding whether to keep them.
• Relinks any assets attached to the ticket, but only the ones actually visible from the destination entity in question.
• Links each new ticket back to the original, so there's a record of where it came from.
• Handles retries safely. If a request times out and you click again, you won't end up with duplicate tickets in any destination.
• Propagates to up to 25 entities in one action, each with its own result, so one destination failing doesn't stop the others.

Requirements

Requirement	Version
GLPI	11.0 or later, before 12.0
PHP	Whatever GLPI 11 itself requires

No additional PHP extensions are needed. This version does add one database table for its own propagation history (see below); it's created automatically on install and dropped on uninstall.

Installation

1. Download or clone this repository into <GLPI_ROOT>/plugins/clone/.
2. Go to Setup > Plugins in GLPI.
3. Find "Clone Ticket" and click Install, then Enable.

cd /var/www/glpi/plugins
git clone https://github.com/jturazzi/clone_glpi clone

Usage

1. Open an existing ticket.
2. Click "Propagate to entity" (visible to supervisors and super-admins).
3. Pick one or more destination entities from the dropdown. A preview appears for each one showing what will carry over and what won't, and why.
4. Click Propagate. The plugin creates a ticket in each destination and shows a result line per destination, with a link to the new ticket wherever it succeeded.

If a category, location, technician, requester, observer, or group on the original ticket doesn't apply in a given destination entity, it's simply left off that new ticket rather than carried over incorrectly. That's exactly what the preview in step 3 tells you before you commit to it. Each new ticket keeps a link back to the one it came from, so you can trace it later.

Permissions

The button only shows up for users with at least one of these rights:

• Ticket -> Assign (supervisors)
• Configuration -> Update (super-admins)

Access to the destination entity itself is checked again on the server, regardless of what the dropdown shows.

How propagation decides what to keep

Nothing is copied onto the new ticket just because the same database ID happens to exist in both entities. Each entity-scoped field is checked before the ticket is created:

• Category and location are kept if they're visible from the destination entity, directly or recursively from a parent entity. Cleared otherwise.
• Requester, assignee, and observer are kept if that person actually has a presence in the destination entity (and, for the assignee specifically, the right rights there).
• Assigned group is checked the same way, against the destination entity.
• Linked assets (computers, phones, and so on) are only relinked if the asset itself is visible from the destination entity. An asset belonging to one customer's entity doesn't get attached to a ticket sitting in another customer's entity.
• SLA and priority are deliberately not copied. The ticket is created through GLPI's normal Ticket::add(), so the destination entity's own business rules decide these values, the same way they would for any ticket created there directly.

Retrying safely

If a propagation request times out or the connection drops before you see a result, clicking the button again won't create duplicate tickets. The browser remembers an in-progress attempt, per ticket and per set of destination entities, for about thirty minutes, and the server recognises a repeated attempt as the same one instead of starting over. If some destinations succeeded and others failed, retrying only re-attempts the ones that failed; the ones that already succeeded come back as-is. Picking a different set of destination entities, or waiting longer than that, is treated as a new attempt.

Bulk fan-out

You can propagate to several entities at once, up to 25 per request. Each destination is independent: it gets its own preview, its own transaction, its own pass/fail result, and one failing has no effect on the others. This is deliberately synchronous, not queued, everything happens within the one request you submit. If you ever need more than 25 destinations at once, that's a sign this plugin would need an asynchronous, scheduled version of propagation, not just a higher number here.

File Structure

clone/
├── hook.php                            # Install/uninstall hooks & POST_ITEM_FORM hook
├── setup.php                           # Plugin registration (version, hooks, assets)
├── phpunit.xml                         # Test configuration (run from a GLPI dev checkout)
├── ajax/
│   ├── clone_ticket.php                # AJAX endpoint, runs the propagation
│   ├── get_entity_dropdown.php         # AJAX endpoint, returns the entity <select>
│   └── preview_propagation.php         # AJAX endpoint, read-only preview of what will happen
├── src/                                # Propagation engine (PSR-4, GlpiPlugin\Clone\*)
│   ├── PropagationRequest.php          # One propagation ask: source ticket + destination entity
│   ├── PropagationPreflightService.php # Decides what to keep or clear, per field
│   ├── PropagationPlan.php             # The decision, per field
│   ├── PropagationExecutor.php         # Creates the ticket, links it, records the result (one destination)
│   ├── PropagationBatchExecutor.php    # Fans one ticket out to several destinations (bulk propagate)
│   ├── PropagationLedgerRepository.php # Reads and writes the propagation history table
│   ├── PropagationError.php            # Error codes shown to admins
│   ├── EntityScopedItemVisibility.php  # Shared category/location/group visibility check
│   ├── TicketActors.php                # Reads a ticket's requesters/assignees/observers/groups
│   ├── Uuid.php                        # UUID generation and validation
│   └── Actor/                          # Per-role eligibility checks
│       ├── AssigneeValidator.php
│       ├── RequesterValidator.php
│       ├── ObserverValidator.php
│       └── GroupValidator.php
├── tests/
│   ├── PropagationPreflightServiceTest.php
│   ├── PropagationExecutorTest.php
│   └── PropagationBatchExecutorTest.php
├── locales/
│   ├── en_GB.po                        # English translations
│   └── fr_FR.po                        # French translations
├── tools/
│   └── compile-locales.php             # Compiles every locales/*.po into a matching .mo
└── public/
    ├── css/
    │   └── clone.css                   # Button & modal styles
    └── js/
        └── clone.js                    # Client-side logic (modal, fetch, Select2, retry safety)

Translations

The plugin ships with English (en_GB) and French (fr_FR) locales. To add a new language, create the corresponding .po file in locales/, then compile every .po file into a matching .mo with the bundled script (no gettext install required):

php tools/compile-locales.php

If msgfmt is available, compiling a single file directly works too:

msgfmt locales/fr_FR.po -o locales/fr_FR.mo

Running the tests

The tests under tests/ are written against GLPI's own test conventions (Glpi\Tests\DbTestCase) and need a real GLPI 11 checkout to run against, with this plugin installed at plugins/clone/ and a configured test database:

phpunit --configuration plugins/clone/phpunit.xml

License

This plugin is distributed under the MIT License.

Author

Jérémy TURAZZI

Contributors

Mohammed GHOUSE

• Replaced raw ticket cloning with the entity-aware propagation engine (checking category, location, requester, assignee, observer, and group against the destination entity; creating the ticket through Ticket::add(); linking source and destination; propagation ledger with idempotent retry handling).
• Added the propagation preview shown in the modal as soon as a destination entity is picked, before the ticket is created.
• Synced the translation catalogs with the renamed and added strings.