List default view deleted in production

[Heather White]

Hi Community,

     We have recently encountered the following error on the incident list view:

Per HI:

"Thank you so much for your time on the call. As discussed on the call, this issue is caused because of a known documented problem PRB591855. In your production instance, the 'incident' default view did not exist and hence the system inherits the default view from task table. Task table has extended fields from incident. Hence, when opening the incident table we are loading extended fields from incident on incident table and hence that error is displayed. The affected users were using the default view while the users who could not see the issue were using a personalized view. To resolve the issue, we created a default view for the incident table without the extended fields and confirmed that the issue was resolved. I will attach the problem ticket to this case so that you can read more about this issue."

This was fixed on Monday.  

Yesterday morning(Wednesday), users encountered the error again.

The default view has been deleted again.  

Any idea why this would happen?  We had run into this issue in the past and had resolved it. 

The issue is not occurring on the sub production instances at this time, as we had a clone scheduled for early Wednesday morning. It was also not replicable before the clone. 

We recently moved Facilities and Change management into our production environment.  I don't know if that would be related, though the problems were not replicable on sub prod.  

Thanks,

Heather

[Tony DiRienzo · Accepted solution]

Hi Heather,

We've seen this happen before in our instances, and have reported it on HI.  In our case, the unexpected deletions occurred when we deactivated a field on the Task [task] table (in the system dictionary, we changed the active flag on that field from true to false).  This caused an undesired cascade delete of all default list views for the Task table and all of its extended tables (Incident, Change, etc.).

When a list view is deleted in any instance, it will generate a customer update XML record in the current update set.  Even in your production instance, these changes are being captured in the Default update set in the Global application scope.  Because of this, you may be able to find out what is causing your default list view to get deleted.  You will probably need the admin role to investigate this, so hopefully you are a system administrator in your instance (or could get assistance from one).  Here's how I would recommend investigating:

• Navigate to the Customer Updates table (sys_update_xml)
• Apply the following filter to the table:
• • Type = "List Layout"
  • View = "Default View"
  • Name = "sys_ui_list_incident_null"
  • Action = "DELETE"
• Sort by Created date to show the most record first.  Note the Created date of the deletion record and the Update set.  Also, check if there is a value for Remote update set (this would indicate that the deletion was caused during development in one of your other instances).  Also note the Created by user.  This will tell you who did whatever action triggered the deletion.
• Using the info you have gathered, look in the Update set which was listed on the record for other changes by the same user that occurred within a few seconds of the list layout deletion.  This might help you determine what caused the inadvertent deletion.

In our case, we were able to use this method to determine that one of our developers had deactivated a field on the Task table just before the list layouts were deleted.  We did additional testing in one of our sub-production instances and found that this was an unintended cascade deletion carried out by the system, and that it happened repeatedly every time we disabled that field.  We reported this as a bug to HI.

Hopefully this helps you trace down the root cause of the undesired list layout deletions you're seeing so that you can avoid them in the future.

[Heather White]

Thanks for this information!  At this point, I was unable to find any results with the search you suggested, as the table was not deleted again after HI assisted us in restoring it.  I will keep this information for any future problems.