Adding Reference Fields to Reports

[ben_kahn]

Hi all,

I'm setting up gauges for ITIL users at my organization. Basically, I've created a report from the TASK table so they can see Incidents and Requested Items that are assigned to a group but not a specific individual. The feedback I've received is that they would like to see the Requester of the Request Item (Request.requester)   and/or the caller of the incident. However these two columns aren't available to add to a report from the TASK table (since the task table itself doesn't have these fields).

I guess I could add the fields to the TASK table but I'm thinking that modifying this table is a bad idea since so many other tables are extended from it.

The other option that seems easy is just to create separate gauges from the INCIDENT and SC_REQ_ITEM tables, but these users like the idea of having one gauge that they can look at to track all their work (in our case those are the only types of task they will ever be assigned).

Please let me know if I am missing something obvious or there is a better solution.

Thanks,

Ben

[swilson]

Hi, Ben. You can add each of the fields from the various task tables (incident.caller, sc_request.requested_for, etc.) to a list report. The problem is that the column for each of these would be blank for every row except the rows for that task type. So for all rows except incidents the Caller column would be empty. A common solution to this is to add a 'Task for' reference field to the task table and use a business rule to set it to the appropriate value based on the task type. So for an incident the business rule would set the 'Task for' field to the Caller value and for a request it would set it to the Requested for value. Then you can simply add the 'Task for' field to your report and gauges.

Hope that helps.

Thanks.

- Steve

[ben_kahn]

Thanks Steve. That makes sense. For now I just created 2 separate gauges, but I'll keep the idea of a custom field in mind for future improvements.

Can you explain how you would go about adding reference fields to a list report IF they aren't listed in the lefthand slushbox? From a report on the Task table I didn't see any option to select/expand Incident or Request Item fields - there was a listing for Parent but that didn't contain any fields from those tables.

[swilson]

If you scroll down the list of available fields you should start to see fields displayed in red. Those are fields from tables that extend task. The table name is shown next to the field name in square brackets.

If you don't see those it's likely because a system property is off. Under System Properties > UI Properties you'll find an entry with the label 'Allow base table lists (task, cmdb_ci, etc.) to include extended table fields (incident_state, os_version, etc.), and allow filtering on extended table fields.'. That needs to be turned on for this to work.

The actual property name is 'glide.ui.list.allow_extended_fields'.

- Steve