I have no experience with 1.3, but perhaps  it’s a config option (like in 2.x) to enable (1) the freefields you want in the FreeText screen.

 

With your suggestion that it might be a configuration option, this morning I did a search of /opt/otrs/... for 'FreeKeyField' and found that  in the /opt/otrs/Kernel/Output/HTML/Standard/AgentFreeText.dtl file the lines with TicketFreeKeyField5..8 were commented out with '#'! 

 

To get 8 FreeTeext field displayed in the 'Free Text' option all I had to do was remove the '#' characters from this file!

 

 

 Furthermore, I have a test&accept and a ‘play-around’ OTRS environment running in a VMWare server environment (Fedora), I can highly recommend this to you. You can copy your production and try out the upgrade steps. (Up to a point you may even have a replacement running.) Running Ubuntu or Fedora recommended.

 

Rather than go down the VM route, I may disconnect the network cable from the OTRS PC, attach a large USB external drive and then reboot the PC with a Knoppix DVD and backup the whole 40Gbyte disk using the command:

 

  dd if=/dev/hda bs=1k conv=sync,noerror | gzip /media/sda1/<filename>.gz
 

After doing this, and still with no network connection so no new tickets are raised, I can then try an upgrade while having the option of restoring the disk back to the way it was. 

 

 

Like the UPGRADING file will tell you, you will have to go through the different versions to upgrade. And still there maybe some catches in the process.

 

As I gathered from reading the documentation with each release.

 

 

Thanks

 

 

Paul 

 

A feature we use is FreeText fields which we pre-fill using an sql statement in a Perl script that is run when an new ticket with a keyword in its subject field is automatically moved to a certain queue.

With OTRS 1.3.1 we can have up 8 FreeText fields and when you zoom in on a ticket all these are displayed on the right of the window. However, when you click on the 'Free Text' option only 4 FreeText fields are presented for editing!

I am sure this has been fixed in a later version of OTRS but is it something easily fixed in the present version by editing a file/files?

 

This brings me to thinking about upgrading as our system is old but we only have our working system and we have no backup system that I can test a upgrade on. Also, I have inherited the OTRS system so I do not know much about it.