values vs labels

[#1]

Hi, to differentiate our incidents, the itil users have to select a location (country) and a category (like hardware, software, ...), dependent of the location. So I created choice list items. I gave them a user-friendly label and a unique value. for instance label = Hardware
value = France Hardware.

Everything looked fine untill I wanted to get some reports. The bar charts looked fine but when I clicked on one of the bars, it did not show me any incidents.

SNC support has told me that this is because the label and the value or different. A bar chart uses the labels to visualize the incident, but when you click on the chart, it uses the value to fetch the incidents.

So either I make my labels less user-friendly or I make my values less unique.

I was wondering, does anyone of you have experienced this also? How do you handle values and labels of choicelists in your instance?

Daan Rousseau

[rob_phillips]

I cannot reproduce the issue you are describing. Can you please elaborate?

The system supports labels and values being different in choice lists - in fact, the out of box system ships with the following:

Category name = Inquiry / Help
Category value = inquiry

Reporting appears to work just fine in this scenario.

[rob_phillips]

Your labels should be unique for each category so that you can differentiate them from one another with reporting (i.e. you don't want two categories labeled "Hardware"), but the label and value can be different.

[#4]

You are right about the label, that it can be different than the value. In our instance the labels are not unique. The combination Label and dependent value (= location) is unique.

So you are saying that it is not allowed to have a label called "hardware", dependent of country Germany AND a label called "hardware",dependent of country France?

That is what we have now and that is when the problem occurs.

I have done some more testing and when creating new choice items SNC (database) allows duplicate labels, even duplicate values, but does not allow duplicates of the combo Label + dependent value.

I just wanna be able to show a barchart with all hardware incidents for all countries AND be able to click into the bar chart to show me the incidents in list form.

This seems to work if the value and the label is called "hardware" (so not unique) and the only difference is the dependent value.

so my dilemma is should I use unique values and have less functionality in reporting or should I use ununique values and have all the functionality that I want.

[#5]

one last question:

is it possible to have an enumeration of dependent values for a choice item

for instance

dependent value = parent1 OR parent2 OR parent3

OR

dependent value = parent1; parent2; parent3

Just like you can do for attributes of a field?