Company search results with no results

[Piemur1]

I'm playing around in my personal dev instance on a freshly blanked out instance with no dummy data. So I was creating some test dummy records and I've begun to notice that despite me creating a company for me to create hardware records out of, when I created a new asset record, the search for Company doesn't come back with any results.

I've created several Company records so I don't understand why this is showing up blank

If anyone can give me any advice I would greatly appreciate it. If you need anything further from me, just let me know!

[Piemur1]

But why would when creating an asset only pull companies that are customers? Wouldn't WE be the customers of those companies whom we're purchasing product from for maintaining and managing our assets in our organization? We would need to source our assets from those companies (for example, Dell), right? And when creating the assets we would want to associate those companies for where that asset originated from, correct? Why would a company need to be marked as a "customer" to be associated with the asset I am creating to add to my tracked items? Is this intentional behavior such that Companies would need to be marked as a customer in order to create asset records and be able to be associated with that company?

I have tested it just now, and noticed that the only way to get access to the Customer flag is in the Customer view when browsing companies, which to me is incredibly misleading.

[ericward]

That I do not have an answer to. You can always configure the reference qualifier so that it is not filtering down to only companies marked as Customer. 

[Jim Coyne · Accepted solution]

As much as I love the ServiceNow platform, this is one of many little quirks that peeve me off to no end.  That Reference Qualifier makes absolutely no sense.  I don't know for sure, but it was probably configured that way based on the OOTB data, which is is terrible.

It should be something like "manufacturer=true^ORvendor=true" instead.  You could create a Dictionary Override on the "cmdb.company" field that would fix it for all CMDB tables without messing with the Reference Qualifier on the base table which would in turn mess up all the "company" fields on the child CMDB tables.

[Piemur1]

Thanks! I think that helped a lot. I DID end up messing with the Reference Qualifier before I came back to your post here and realized I might have messed some things up and put it back in again for Customer is True.

So do I need to create a Dictionary Override for every table that is an asset that is purchased via a manufacturer/vendor for each asset type? Such as will I need to make this override for the servers table, and then for switch table, and then for each of those sub-tables and so on? I'm kind of new to the whole CMDB Asset Management side of things, so I'm not entirely sure at what point of the hierarchy I should put in this override.

Is there like a tables hierarchy data view for these reference tables? To see what table is a referenced table on a parent table and so on? Like cmdb_ci is like one of the root tables, would it cause issues putting in the override on that table or something?

[Jim Coyne]

Putting it on "cmdb_ci" pretty much solves it for all your CI structure.  As you said it is one of the base tables.  It actually used to be THE base CMDB table until SN added the "cmdb" table for some reason.  So the structure looks like this now:

"cmdb" is at the root now, then "cmdb_ci" (the old root) and then it explodes out from there.  The reason you want to add an override on the "cmdb_ci" table is that would be the new Reference Qualifier for all subsequent child tables without messing with the record on the "cmdb" root table, which will cause "Skipped Records" that you have to deal with during each upgrade/update.  Even though you "put it back", you modified the record, making it yours to maintain from now on.  You would want to "revert" it to the last SN version to avoid that hassle.  Do you have a more experienced admin who would know how to do that?

You can take a look at the "'Show Schema Map' Tools" listed on the Developer Toolbox page.  They make it easy to see the table hierarchies from whatever table you are looking at.