Incident state showing -5 (value for pending)

[Travers M]

I've run into a bit of an issue with my Incident table and I'm 95% sure it has to do with something that was done in Change Management.   I know both extend task and use the same state variable.     I moved over an update set last night for Change and during development I never went back and looked at Incident as I wasn't doing anything there so I have no idea when this actually went wacky.     Now when I create a new or an incident comes into the system, it's getting a value of -5 in the state field.   A new Change Request is entered with the same value so this has to be tied together, I just can't for the life of me figure out where or how.   We've used Incident for over 3 years now and it was always entered into the system as New and not a numerical value.

Now I know it says -5 in the field because I don't have pending as a valid choice.   If I move it over to be a choice, it does say pending.     How does it assign that value when a new incident is created though and is this going to cause me problems on the other side with change if I do get this righted?

[Chuck Tomasi · Accepted solution]

If you change it on the dictionary entry for task.state (as shown above) all task tables will get that as a default value. It may not be an appropriate value for all task states. 1 may be New for change, but Awaiting assignment for Incident, and nothing for a requested item.

I encourage you to change the table specific default state values using the Dictionary Overrides related list at the bottom to set the default value for each table separately (even if they are the same value.)

Dictionary overrides

[Chuck Tomasi]

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Thank you

[Travers M]

That will certainly solve my problem, thank you.   Now how do I find out how that was set that way?     It seems odd that this surfaces after all this time when I know I didn't do anything in that area.

[Chuck Tomasi]

It's difficult to say without looking at the history of some of those records. Someone else may have changed that was overriding the default state value from a business rule, for example. If that BR was disabled, the task.state default value would be exposed again. That's one possible scenario.

Proper use of default values should start with the dictionary and then go to data lookups or business rules when logic is required to set the value.

[Chuck Tomasi]

If it solved your issue, don't forget to mark it Correct. We can continue to look for clues why it was behaving that way.