[[PageOutline(2-5,Contents,pullout)]]

= Ticket Aliases Proposal

== Introduction

Tickets are identified by a number. It can happen that one has to work simultaneously on many tickets, and knowing them by heart can become problematic.

Of course, there's the Report, Query and Search facilities to identify them and keep track of them. One could even use the Wiki to maintain informal groups of tickets.

But it would be nice to have textual aliases for tickets. The alias would be an alternative identifier for the ticket.

There would be a very simple way to achieve this: simply create a wiki page having the desired alias name, and put the appropriate ticket TracLinks as its only content!

Then, before displaying the page, the Wiki module could check quite simply if the only content of the page is a link, and if this is the case, simply redirect to the corresponding target.

See also #976.

== Extension to other Trac objects

This mechanism would work not only tickets, but can be used for any kind of Trac object, such as aliases to wiki pages, changesets,
file, etc. 

This mechanism can be implemented in a similar way to the ''redirect'' feature of other Wikis:
 * Wikipedia's [wikipedia:Redirect_page] and !WikiMedia's [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Redirect #REDIRECT].
 * MoinMoin's [http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/HelpOnProcessingInstructions?highlight=%28redirect%29 #redirect].
 * A [http://svn.ipd.uni-karlsruhe.de/trac/javaparty/wiki/TracRedirect redirect] macro for Trac, which could be used as a starting point for the implementation. It would be even better if Trac had this capability built-in: 
   * no installation steps required
   * combine this with a TracAdmin `wiki rename` command (see #1106)