Introduction
MRequest was retired on December 17, 2021. As part of this project, ITS partnered with customers to define how they used MRequest and to define a migration path to other ITS supported services, including, but not limited to, TeamDynamix. Units migrated in late 2020, or in 2021, and MRequest entered retirement on December 17, 2021. ITS supplied archival MRequest data for units wishing to retain their old ticket data.
On June 30, 2022 the data on the MRequest (FootPrints) servers was securely destroyed. Any data shared in Dropbox archives was turned over to unit IT contacts if they had been requested by the unit.
This document provides information on the data contained in the MRequest Archives Dropbox Team Folders. ITS MRequest (FootPrints) shall be referred to as MRequest throughout this document.
Sharing the archives
Team folder owners are responsible to share individual workspace folders. See Dropbox: Share a Dropbox File or Folder for details on sharing in Dropbox.
Sharing the workspace archives
To allow staff access to workspace archives the workspace archive folder must be shared with the staff member(s).
- Share using MCommunity groups instead of listing individual staff. This allows for easier onboarding and offboarding.
- Dropbox only recognizes members at the top level of a MCommunity group. Members of sub-groups will not be given access in Dropbox.
- Use the contents of DROPBOX.TXT in the top-level of the workspace archive in the 'Add a note' section of the sharing dialog to provide context and documentation on the archives.
Access to the team folder
To add individuals as owners of the overall team folder, add them to the MCommunity group that owns the team folder. This is the group you provided when creating the team folder. If you do not recall the name of this group, anyone with access to the top level of the team folder can click Share when viewing the team folder to reveal the group name. If you are unable to do this, contact the ITS Service Center for assistance.
Archive description
Archived data from MRequest was copied to unit Dropbox Team Folders. Data archived in unit-provided Dropbox Team Folders is the responsibility of the unit to manage going forward.
Within each of the Dropbox Team Folders is one or more sub-folders (one sub-folder per archived workspace). Each sub-folder is named with the workspace name and workspace number. If 'Example Workspace' has the number '123' then the archive folder will be 'Example Workspace (123)'.
Access to workspace archives is controlled by membership in a MCommunity group, 'MRequest Archives ###' -- in this example the MCommunity group would be 'MRequest Archives 123'. Members of the MCommunity group will have view access to the archive folders for that workspace. Unit admins can also share workspace archives directly with individuals and other groups if they desire. Individuals that are solely listed as owners in an MCommunity group do not have any access to the archives.
Workspace archives contain:
- CSV files of the workspace data, along with text files containing the contents of the Description field
- mysql 'dump' files of the workspace data
- Copies of attachments from the workspace
- Additional informational files from the archiving process
Top-level text files
The top-level of the workspace archive may contain several text files. These are mostly for tracking during the archive creation process, but can also be informative.
- all_attachments.txt - a list of all file attachments associated with the workspace
- files_with_tickets.txt - file attachments associated with one or more tickets
- orphaned_attachments.txt - files that could not be associated with a ticket. This might be due to a system error in the past, a ticket being deleted without the file also being deleted, or similar problems
- RENAMED_FILES.TXT - a list of files that had to be renamed due to case collisions. See 'Renamed Files' in the Attachments section (below) for more information.
- tickets_with_attachments.txt - a list of attachments for each ticket
- tickets_with_missing_attachments.txt - tickets that claim an attachment which could not be found. These attachments might be considered orphaned due to a past system issue.
- HISTORY.TXT - a list of all updates that have been made to the archive, including the date/time at which they were made
- README.TXT - a brief description of the archive with a pointer to online documentation
- README.docx - a formatted copy of this document
- DROPBOX.TXT - sample text to use for the 'Add a note' section when sharing workspace archives with other staff
CSV and text files
The Exports directory contains CSV and text files of the workspace data. These can be viewed using Google Sheets/Docs, Excel/Word, and other tools, or can be imported into another system that accepts CSV data.
Two sets of CSV and text files are provided, containing the same data.
First set: all tickets in a single CSV or text file, recommended for importing into other systems
Second set: split into files containing no more than 5,000 tickets each, recommended for use in Google or Office tools, which may not be able to effectively handle large data sets.
The files are named with the range of ticket numbers they contain. This directory also contains a INDEX.TXT file listing each date range and the tickets in that range.
Example file list:
all_descriptions.txt all_descriptions_original.txt all_tickets.csv descriptions_10800-16417.txt descriptions_5302-10799.txt descriptions_5-5301.txt descriptions_10800-16417_original.txt descriptions_5302-10799_original.txt descriptions_5-5301_original.txt INDEX.TXT tickets_10800-16417.csv tickets_5302-10799.csv tickets_5-5301.csv
Example INDEX.TXT for the previous file list:
First Date/Time Last Date/Time First # Last # 2010-06-23 08:57:08 2013-02-06 15:13:12 5 5,301 2013-02-06 16:16:19 2015-08-06 08:50:01 5,302 10,799 2015-08-06 11:01:55 2018-08-18 09:58:51 10,800 16,417 2018-08-18 10:09:54 2021-10-01 15:08:32 16,418 21,283
Using the CSV & text files
If you just need the details from the Description field of the ticket, the text files will be easiest to use. Using the CSV files are recommended if you need to see other fields. It is expected that you will use Google Sheets or Excel for viewing CSV files, and Google Docs or Word for the text files, although other spreadsheets and text editors should work.
If you know the ticket number in question, open the corresponding CSV or text file and search for the ticket number. If you don't know the ticket number, open and search one or more of the CSV files to locate the ticket(s). Use the INDEX.TXT file to find the file(s) to search based on the date ranges.
The '_original' text files contain the actual text of the Description fields as it existed in MRequest. The export process for the other CSV and text files removed HTML tags and encoding from the Descriptions to make them easier to read. In most cases this won't cause any issues, but there are some situations where something necessary may have been removed or altered in the export process. You can consult these ‘_original’ text files to find the original text.
Attachments
The Attachments folder contains a sub-folder for each ticket that has an attachment. Within the Attachments folder, use the search bar within Dropbox to search for the ticket number.
Renamed files
The MRequest server used case-sensitive file names, but Dropbox is case-insensitive. This means that MRequest saw ABC.TXT and abc.txt as two different files, but Dropbox considers them the same file name. To avoid losing data, the archival process detected these case collisions (where the only difference is one or more capital letters). For example, if the following three files were attachments on the same ticket:
ABC.TXT
ABC.txt
abc.txt
the files would be added to the archive as:
ABC.TXT
ABC_1.txt
abc_2.txt
When this happens, a RENAMED_FILES.TXT file was added to the ticket's sub-folder. Additionally, there is a RENAMED_FILES.TXT in the Attachments folder that lists the ticket number and renaming activity for the entire workspace.
Database Export
The mysql_exports folder contains dump files produced by the mysql database engine for the workspace's database tables. These can be used to import the data into a mysql server operated by the unit or a mysql MiDatabase instance. It may be possible to use these to import into other database systems.
These files are not useful for individual queries.