Investigate a Form Field Gone Missing

[Shahed Shah1]

One of the common UI issues encountered is when a user (or users) notices that a field is no longer visible on the form, be it after an upgrade or eventually. The first thought in your mind was probably to look for the UI Policy or Client Script. Good. But what do you look at if it's one of those? I can see your brain is cranking away only to realize another common factor, announcing with a big smile: ACLs. Because a user does not match the criteria for any read ACL for a field then the field will not render.

Let's say you looked at the ACLs, but even that does not bring up a light bulb. What else?

• Data Policies (Highly underused)
• Form Personalization - introduced in Fuji, which allows a user to customize the form layout for themselves.

So... it's all looking good. Is that the end of it? Not really, no.

Let's backtrack a little and consider the initial approach to investigating this issue, without going into too much detail:

1. Assessing the impact of the missing field on your form.
2. What to look at when all users are affected.
3. What to look at when a subset of users are affected.

Let's also look at other available tools to help troubleshoot why a field has gone missing.

Determining what happened to the missing field:

First you would want to assess the impact of the issue. How many users are affected? One user? A subset of users? All of the users? If all of the users are affected, you would want to check the Form Layout and verify if the field is actually present in the Selected list.

(Is it in there?)

If not all the users are affected and only a subset or individual user is being affected, you want to check what view the users (or user) are looking at. Perhaps the affected users are looking at a different view. If it is the same view, are you using Domain Separation? The same view can potentially differ between domains.

Now, if you are looking at a single user being affected, you can look at whether he or she have personalized the form where the field has gone missing. This can be done by impersonating the user. After impersonating the user, click the Form Personalization icon, shown below:

(Oh, look. Another cog.)

If you notice an unchecked field then you have confirmation that the form has been personalized. Since this is stored as a user preference, you can alternatively, look at the User Preference table and filter is as such: [User] [is] [<name of the affected user>] and [Name] [contains] [personalize]

The name of the preference is in the format of: personalize_<table>_<view>

The value in the preference would be field(s) checked off in the list when clicking on the cog. If you have checked the user preferences and form personalization, I guess you're itching to look at the Client Scripts and other items. Before you do that and end up being caught in debugging for a while, I'd like to save your time and introduce a useful tool shown in the screenshot below, taken from a Fuji demo:

(Ooh, what's that?)

As you can see there is a mention of a Field Watcher. This little gem (or golden nugget if you prefer) was introduced in the Dublin release and will check for fields being modified or changed by Client Scripts, UI Policies, Data Policies and ACLs. It even allows you to watch a hidden field.

From my tests of using the Field Watcher, on a Fuji demo, it doesn't seem to pickup whether the user has made use of Form Personalization.

Let's do a quick recap.

A field can be hidden by any one (or a combination) of the following:

1. Client Scripts
2. UI Policies
3. Data Policies
4. ACLs
5. Form Personalization

Things to consider/investigate:

1. Assess the impact and check the form view/layout
2. Can check the User Preference for Form Personalization
3. Can use the Field Watcher to see what will influence the visibility of the affected field(s)

Of course, this just scratches the surface, but I do hope it gives you a head start in investigating such issues when they arise.

UPDATE:

Our wonderful team of people pushing out Knowledge has actually released a YouTube video to help troubleshoot this further.

Check it out here: Troubleshooting a Missing Form Field - YouTube