Assigned to name reverting back to old name

[Jason_DaSilva]

We were having this issue for a long time, but it was not happening on every asset record.  Reports were on the lines of the value did not change (when done through a Catalog item form) or after saving the name changes back to either the previous name, or their manager's name.  Looking at the record history, the change submitted by the tech shows up, but not the action of it changing back.  If you repeat this process again, no history change shows.

Poking around a bit (as I did not initially work on HAM stuff) I found that on many of our orders, the IT manager for that region's name is set in the Reserved for field.  This was not the case a few months ago, and seems to have popped up after we started in with HAM pro.  So I am not sure if this is standard (part of my question here) or if this was some custom work done by the previous (no longer with our company) contractor working on the HAM setup.

What I found interesting after I realized that the Reserved for field was the cause, was that if you cleared the value in the Reserved for field, the assigned to would show the proper user.  This is the real confusing part to me.   Another confusing thing is that if you bully it a bit (changing values of the assigned to field to different users) eventually the Reserved for field picks up one of these users, but things visually seem to be broken.  The history will show the change of the assigned to field, but the record shows the Reserved for name in that field.  This corrects as soon as you remove the Reserved for value (set it to empty).

On the Asset record form, if you set the asset to any state besides On order/In transit/In stock, the Reserved for field becomes hidden, which is why the techs never picked up on this.  I have a few ideas on how to fix this (such as a business rule that will clear the reserved for field, adding an activity journal entry, when the assigned to changes) but curious if this is the case for anyone else, and what they did to solve this.

[Oscar D]

I don’t fully understand your explanation of the issue. When the Reserved for field is set, it is expected behavior that, as the asset transitions out of On Order, In Transit, or In Stock, the Assigned to field is populated with the value from Reserved for, regardless of whether Assigned to already has a value in the backend. It seems you haven’t identified the root cause of why some assets have the Reserved for field populated. One known issue occurs when using the Stock Order Request. In this scenario, assets can be reserved if they are received via the Receiving UI page. To address this, you can implement a business rule on the Purchase Order Line to clear the Requested For field on the POL when the Stock Order checkbox is set to true. In addition, "Reserved For" is also set by transfer orders if you close complete the "Delivery" task. 

[Jason_DaSilva]

You are correct that our issue is that the Reserved for field is being set when it should not be.  In our past, a contractor set up a specific Catalog item for our Techs to use when assigning equipment.  This was done before I was part of the team.  when this catalog item was completed, it would change the assigned to and state of the asset.  Techs started to notice that in the record view, the wrong name was showing in the assigned to field.  This is specifically due to the fact that the Reserved for field had a value.  This is easily replicated.  Take a asset record and move it to In stock.  Set the Reserved for field to a user and save the record.  Change the state to In use.  The Reserved for field is now hidden.  set a value in the assigned to field to a different user and save the record.  Refresh the record view.  When ever we do this, the assigned to field of the record view changes to the reserved for value.  If you go out to the list view of the alm_hardware table and look up that record, the assigned to will show what you set.  My complaint here is more that occurrence which has caused confusion over the past few months with record keeping.  IF you don't know how to interpret that, its hard to work with or explain.