Displaying Name v. UserID in 'updated_by' in list views?

[jonathonbarton]

Hi, all

My current gig is working with a company that uses a numeric UserID, and have the user's name (concatenated from AD First and Last Names) in a separate field.

Some fields (Assigned to, etc.) in List View are displaying Name - but Resolved By and Updated By are displaying the numeric UserID.
I was able to update the dictionary entry for Resolved By successfully, and I found the Dictionary Entry for Updated By on the Task table (sys_updated_by) , but none of the fields are editable that I can see,

What painfully obvious thing am I missing here?

Thanks!

[Goran WitchDoc]

Problem here is that sys_updated_by isn't a reference field. and some background stuff to update that field. I guess that's why it's all read only.

Not much of a help here thou

[The SN Nerd]

Some context on sys_updated_by:

Every record in ServiceNow has sys_updated_by and sys_created_by. i think of these as 'metadata'.
Some records may come from another system, alas these system fields don't reference another record in the system.

For example, you may install an application on the store. The people who created the records won't have user ID's in your system, so it makes sense to have this meta data as strings. This is a key reason (in my view) for the design decision by the vendor to do this.

[simonw]

Any reason you'd not want to add new fields and have a business rule which converts your numeric UserID to a more useful value in your new fields on change of sys_updated_by and sys_created_by?

[The SN Nerd]

For most builds we add a resolved_by,closed_by and opened_by user fields that reference the User table.