Users of Request Tracker spend much of their time on the ticket display page. When this page takes a long time to load it can be a real frustration. This delay is often due to a long ticket history; if a ticket is old enough, it can have hundreds of transactions, and it takes a while for all that data to come all the way from the server down to your screen.
RT already has a number of history load options to tweak this section to your needs:
- Show after rest of the page loads
- Show after clicking a link
- Show immediately
And with RT 4.4 we introduce another one: Infinite Scroll.
Infinite scroll is a pattern becoming increasingly popular on modern websites. With infinite scroll in RT, after the rest of the page loads, there will be an initial loading of 10 transactions. As you scroll down the page, RT will automatically load 10 more transactions at a time. The goal is that each history entry is already loaded by the time you've scrolled down to it, without having to wait a long time up-front for all the history to load. We feel this is the perfect balance between performance and usability.
Infinite scroll pairs well with the "Show oldest history first: No" preference. Having that option and infinite scroll enabled allows you to quickly load tickets that may have previously taken a long time to load so you can immediately see that ticket's latest activity.
To use infinite scroll in RT 4.4, simply go to the user preferences page from the menu: Navigate to Logged in as username → Settings → Preferences, scroll down to "Ticket display", and change "Show history" to "as you scroll". Then when you view any ticket's display page, the history will use infinite scroll. This will change the preference on a user-by-user basis.
Site administrators can also change RT's default option in RT_SiteConfig.pm with:
Set($ShowHistory, 'scroll');
See the RT_Config.pm documentation for more information.
If you missed some other posts on the new features in RT 4.4, you can find more in the new feature overview.