Clarify table elements: incident_state vs state; active

tayrez · ‎06-27-2015

Hello,

What is the difference between incident_state and state on the Incident table? How are they used (out of box)? What is their relationship?

Active Field (not specifically the incident table): What is it used for? What sets the switch? Where I can I learn more about it?

Thanks,

Therese

bernyalvarado · ‎06-27-2015

Hi Therese,

You're welcome!

As for the other question, the active state in the task table is managed primarily by a business rule which is called Task Active State Management. That business rule will set the active state in accordance to whether the state of the task is an "inactive type of state". That definition of an inactive state can be found in the script include TaskStateUtil which specifies the states 3, 4 and 7 as inactive states.

On a similar way, there's a lot of business rules that actually set the active flag to false, but from what i know, OOB there's consistency in setting respective state values that represent an inactive item. (You can see these by searching in business rules and other server/client scripts for where the script field contains .active = false)

In your case, i believe you could have some customizations (or users) that perhaps are directly setting the active flag to false without setting the respective state to an inactive type of state.

I hope this is helpful!

Thanks,

Berny

View solution in original post

akeppel · ‎09-02-2016

This is what we did too. We've just started moving away from that by making sure that, for every sys_choice option/value pair in the incident_state field we have a corresponding entry for the state element for the incident table (in sys_choice.) If someone updates incident.incident_state on a record it updates the incident.state as well (and vice-versa.)

That way, we can leave all of the business rules in place for the incident_state field for now, but start migrating over to the state field on forms and reports, and can get all of our reporting off of the state field (this made a lot of our reports look much less messy.)