System is creating new records automatically with empty "Created" and "Created by" fields

[Farah5]

I'm dealing with a very strange issue I've never seen before. We have a custom table where you can save a form as a "Draft" (current status = draft). Several fields are required to be filled out before you can even save it as a draft. However, we've noticed that there are a bunch of empty Draft records being automatically created in the system. The record is active, but not a single field on the form is filled out. The strangest thing is that the "Created" and "Created by" fields are empty, and there is no history whatsoever on the record. This makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint when and how these tickets are created. 

Does anyone have any idea of what could cause a record to be automatically created without a "Created" or "Created by" date? This is happening in our DEV, TEST, and PROD instances. There doesn't seem to be any pattern for when these are created. 

[Farah5]

Hi Dirk, 

I've tried resetting the views, and there is no difference. I am absolutely certain that those fields are the OOTB sys_created_on and sys_created_by fields. If I try to run a background script for those two records and log the sys_created_on and sys_created_by fields, the values are coming out blank. In one of my responses above, I also pointed out that if I try to open up the calendar history for one of those records, I am brought to a totally blank page (screenshot below).

I did what you said and ran a script for the entire table. I'm posting another screenshot of the output below.

[DirkRedeker]

Cool!

Do you have some display Business Rules in place on that table?

BR

Dirk

[Farah5]

We have several display business rules. I'm not super familiar with display BR's though, and the existing ones were created before I jumped onto this project. How does this affect how records are being created?

[DirkRedeker]

Hi

In Display BR, you can "tweak" your data to be shown. So this may be the "hack" to hide the values from the fields.

Also you may have concrete "read" ACLs on your custom table, that prevents access to those columns.

Let me know, please.

BR

Dirk

[Farah5]

Hm, I'm sorry but that doesn't make sense to me. It's clearly the same field as all the other normal records, and the value also shows up blank if I try to log it in a script. I checked either way and there are no display BR's for these fields. I know it's not an ACL issue. 

I've narrowed it down to one particular part in the workflow for this table. In regular records, there is a final task to complete before the workflow is finished. As soon as this task is closed, one of these new erroneous records is created. There is something triggering this when the task is closed, but I can't find any scripts that might be causing this.