How To Prevent Business Rule Recursive Looping When Adding a Counter Field

[jmiskey]

We have a situation where a team needs to report on how many times their Incidents have been reassigned.  So, I have added a custom field to the Incident table named u_assignment_group_count.  I am now working on a Business Rule to maintain that counter.

Here are the conditions on which that new field should be updated:

- Category is "Workday"

- Assignment Group field value is changed/updated

It should NOT run if fields other than the Assignment Group are changed (and the Assignment Group field remains the same).

So, here is how I set up the conditions:

And then I created script on the Advanced tab to increment the new field by 1, like this:

However, when I submit a record, and try to change the Assignment Group, ServiceNow just hangs, and never finished update unless I click "Cancel" on the timer counter that pops up.  I think it is getting caught in a recursive loop.  If I disable the rule, it updates immediately with no issue.  So I suspect their is an issue with how I set up the Business Rule.

How can I adjust my Business Rule to work the way I want it to, and not hang up?

Thanks

[Brad Bowman · Accepted solution]

You don't need to do a GlideRecord in a BR to lookup the current record - just use 'current.field_name' to get or set a value.  You should also do this before Update, and remove the update() line.  Since you didn't mention it, are you aware of the reassignment_count field that is already doing this?

[jmiskey]

No, I was not aware of that field!  That is awesome!  That is exactly what I need.

I guess I don't need this Business Rule after all.

Thank you very much!

[Chaitanya ILCR]

Hi @jmiskey ,

if (current.assignment_group.changes() && current.assignment_group) {
    current.u_assignment_group_count += 1;
}

make it a Before insert/update BR with above script .

isn't this functionality already exist with task level with reassignment_count field?
you want to track the changes of workday category separately is it?

Please mark my answer as helpful/correct if it resolves your query.

Regards,
Chaitanya