While setting up foundation data on my Brazil PDI for an Employee Center portfolio build, I hit an out-of-the-box reference qualifier that’s worth knowing about, especially if you create companies manually or import them without mapping the Customer field.
The problem
I created a company record for AshbiaNow, my fictional retail company, then created a Finance department. When I tried to set the department’s Company field, AshbiaNow wasn’t in the lookup, even when I searched for it.
How I diagnosed it
- I opened the full Companies list (core_company.list). AshbiaNow was there, along with 178 companies in total.
- The lookup on the department form only showed 17 companies.
- 178 in the table but 17 in the lookup meant something was filtering the lookup. One gotcha: the lookup’s breadcrumb still said “All”, so I couldn’t rely on it to show the filter. The count was the real clue.
- I right-clicked the Company field label → Configure Dictionary and found the reference qualifier: Customer is true.
The cause
My new company didn’t have the Customer flag set. All 17 companies in the lookup were demo companies with Customer = true.
“But AshbiaNow isn’t a customer”, or is it?
My first reaction was that ticking Customer would be wrong. Then I thought about it in ITIL terms, having just completed the ITIL (Version 5) Foundation bridge. Every service relationship has a service provider and a service consumer, and the consumer is split into the sponsor who funds the service, the customer who defines the requirements, and the user who works with it every day.
AshbiaNow’s IT department is an internal service provider, and the rest of the organization is its service consumer. A store team member logging a till problem is a user; the Finance manager who sets out what her team needs from IT is a customer. Seen that way, the Customer flag on the company record is ServiceNow’s way of marking “an organization we serve”, as opposed to a vendor or manufacturer. That’s exactly what AshbiaNow is to its own IT team.
The fix, and the decision behind it
I had two options:
- Change the reference qualifier on the dictionary entry, or
- Set Customer = true on my own company record.
I chose the second. Changing the qualifier would modify an out-of-the-box dictionary entry that every department lookup relies on, and it would become a customization to carry through upgrades. Changing my own data affects only my record.
What I’m taking away
- A quick check that saves time with any reference lookup: compare the record count in the table with the count in the lookup. If they differ, look for a reference qualifier, and understand why it exists before deciding whether to change it.
- Knowing the framework helped me understand why the platform’s data model is shaped the way it is, not just how to configure it.
Has anyone else been caught by this one? I’d be interested to hear if there are other out-of-the-box qualifiers that commonly catch people out.
