question about updating filter conditions for affected CI on the INC form

[Jordan Rhude]

Hello all, looking for some advice on best practice regarding a request. 
We are currently trying attempting to implement more CI based tracking in Change and Incident management. I am currently being tasked with updating the INC forms, so that when you select a specific category, then choose a specific "Affected CI" from "Look up using List" it will narrow the results by selecting a specific table. Example: Category Hardware is selected , so now when you open "Affected CI" from "Look up using List" it shows results results from cmdb_ci_computer.list that have an operational status of operational and a hardware status that is installed. Versus what they see now which is almost everything from the cmdb_ci.list table.

Currently my research has lead to possibly using a reference qualifier or a script include. But scripting is not a strong suite of mine. So what I am after is there an easier way to accomplish this, or am I headed down the correct path?
Also looking to keep this as OOB as possible so that its not affected by updates to the system.

[Sasha Sobolev]

Jordan,

You are headed down the right path if you want to make the Affected CI field dynamic based on the Category options. Linked here is an example of a scripted reference qualifier...at a high level you'll need to pass in the category (current.category) and have a bunch of "if/else if" statements that check what the category is...ex. if (category = "hardware") { return sys_class=cmdb_ci_hardware; }

From a best practice perspective, you'll eventually want to get to all CIs being linked up to services, where you would first select a service and then that would filter down the list of CIs further. However, category is a great start to make it easier for your Incident fulfiller to filter down and select a CI.

One recommendation - depending on what you have stored in your CMDB, you may want to make an "Other" category that would show any CI...in case there's some outside of the categories that ever need to be selected.

Hope this helps.

Sasha

[Jordan Rhude]

Thanks for the confirmation, about going down the right path. Wanted to do some research and make sure I was pointed in the right direction. 
I ended up blending some of your answer with answer i found on a knowledge blog. I then end up making my own script. 
As for the rest of your comment I agree, Service Mapping is on the horizon for us, and we are taking slow steps towards that goal. (baby steps)

Thanks again 
Jordan.