Mandatory Field Validation in Server-Side UI Actions?

[Chris Sanford1]

I have a UI action that runs server-side to update the state of a reocrd. The script is very simple:

moveToImplemented();

function moveToImplemented(){
	current.state = 2;
	current.update();
	action.setRedirectURL(current);
}

My question is, will this automatically validate that mandatory fields in the previous state are populated? I was always under the assumption that it did, based on testing and observation clicking the button gave me an error message if I left mandatory fields blank. However, I ask because we recently had one case where a user somehow got to this new state without populating the mandatory fields.

Actually, this user says that they did indeed fill in all the mandatory fields, and update via the UI Action button, but there is no indication in the audit history that any of those fields were ever set. I'm very confused as to how it would even be possible to leave those fields blank, as every attempt to reproduce the issue has shown the expected result.

[nthumma]

One thought is to check if the field in question is maybe conditionally mandatory? It might be mandatory in certain conditions, not all the time?

[Chris Sanford1]

It is mandatory with a UI Policy that checks the state. I definitely think they were mandatory, and the user says they populated these fields and I trust them. The UI policy and UI action have both been in place and unchanged for some time now, and this is the first time I have ever seen this happen.

[HarshTimes]

Hi Chris

You can try using the before update business rule. You have two objects here current and previous.

You can put a if condition like below.

if(previous.state== 'X' &&  current.state== 'Y'){

If(current.FIELD_NAME1 == '' || current.FIELD_NAME2 == ''){

gs.addErrorMessage("please fill mandatory fields");

current.setAbortAction(true);

}

}

[Chris Sanford1]

What I don't understand is why that business rule would be necessary? In every attempt I've made to reproduce the issue, it behaves as expected. I get "the following mandatory fields are not filled in" error without any business rules. It seems like it was an isolated occurrence. I actually even had the exact same record in a cloned test environment and it behaved as expected impersonating that user. I reported it to the customer as an isolated glitch in ServiceNow.

One thought I had was maybe they were on a different view. But it won't even let me change the view until I fill in the mandatory fields.