Variables showing sysid instead of value in variable summary

[Asmita20]

We have a catalog item from which we are deleting the records from table. When the request is in approval state , it is showing the value but once it is approved or the record got deleted it is showing sys id.

Field type is lookup select box.

Can anyone please guide how to show the value instead of sys id.

Thanks in advance.

[Tony Chatfield2 · Accepted solution]

Hi, if the variable is a reference to a record, then while the record exists it will show the records display value, but once the record is deleted it will show the records sys_id, and I would call this correct\expected behavior.
If you want to show the display value of a deleted record you would need to populate this as a string somewhere, so that it was available after the reference record was deleted.
One option may be to change the variable type to string, populate the display value of the record and then use a script to lookup and delete the related reference record, but this would have a dependency on your display values being unique and I would not normally recommend this approach as best practice.