Browser Session Troubleshooting - Use of Multiple Browsers

[kchorny]

I'm having a tough time understanding what is happening here, and would appreciate any insight.

I have a user who is reporting that he updated comments in an incident in IE (INC0130327), and his comments got written to an incident he had opened in Chrome (INC0129642), but the Chrome incident did not update until he tried to navigate away from it, was prompted that his updates had not been saved, at which time he saved it (not being sure why he was prompted).   The IE incident did not get updated at all.

It is important to note that we are using the servicenowguru enhancement described here extensively in our instance to control state management and required fields: GlideDialogWindow: QuickForms - ServiceNow Guru

To add notes to an incident, a UI Action called Add Notes opens a dialog box.   That box contains a time worked field and two 'placeholder' fields, Internal Comments and External Comments.   These fields are used because when the comments field gets very large, the dialog box gets to be an unmanageable size.   The notes are put into the placeholder fields and then copied to the incident via an Update Notes button from the dialog box.   It is at this point in the process where I feel like, if this did actually happen, this is where it happened.

When I look at the time stamp of the offending note, I see that it was updated on the Chrome incident at 11:04:14 am.   So I searched the transaction log entries for this user, and find no transactions during this time frame where the User Agent is IE, there are only Chrome transactions.   I also see no IE transactions prior to that time frame associated to the IE incident, where IE was the agent, or that don't look like legitimate updates.

Is it even possible for a user to initiate an action in one browser and have that action get partially applied to another browser session?   Would it be possible for that action to not be captured in the transaction log as an IE transaction at all?

I've attached the components in play (minus the view configuration), in case anyone is inclined to dig into this.

[coryseering]

Hi Karla,

The issue as described is seemingly impossible. There is no cross-communication between browsers like that. Also, if this user was using two browsers, they would have two different login sessions at the same time (they'd be logged in twice, with separate session IDs). The event log should show two "session.established" events for this user (one for each browser's log-in). The "Instance" field on the event will give you their session ID.

You can then find the transactions that are specific to each browser's session, and verify that they really did load up that incident in Chrome, and submit the update from Chrome.

I just can't see the scenario playing out the way the user thinks it did.

[kchorny]

Thank you for your response and the troubleshooting tips!   I'm about to chalk this up to a user 'recollection of events' error (so frustrating!!!), but would just like to see if anyone disagrees with us before I mark your answer as correct.