Incident Tasking - Extend Incident or Task Table?

Wendy Peterson · ‎06-10-2014

I am going to be making an Incident Task table to use as an extension of Incident. I am trying to figure out if I should extend the Task table or Incident Table. Any idea what would be the advantage of doing either. I'll be setting up the on call rules to use whatever table i set up just like incident so i don't think it matters as long as it's referring to a different table. TIA

Jim Coyne · ‎06-11-2014

I actually disagree with the idea of extending the Incident table. I would, and have created an Incident Task table, but by extending the Task table instead. Most of all the fields you would probably need are on Task anyways. All you need to do is add a reference field back to Incident and you are probably done.

Extending the Incident table does not give you a logical Parent/Child relationship, but more of a different "type" of Incident. Just like how Incident extends the Task table, it created a different type of Task.

And if you extended Incident, when you look at a list of your Incidents, the Incident Tasks would be included in that list. That's because, in essence, they would be Incidents as well. Real messy.

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Wendy Peterson · ‎06-12-2014

Thanks for all the recommendations. After researching this I can't see any added benefit of extending the incident table so I am going to be doing it on the Task table. There aren't fields that I need from the incident table that i can't write a rule to copy in the action to create these. I figure the on call when i get the business rules will work ok cause that's based off the table. I was just wondering what the best practice was.

Thanks..

Jim Coyne · ‎06-12-2014

Please remember to mark any answer as Helpful or Correct. Thanks.

bianca.vaccarini

sigvalbergesen · ‎11-25-2016

Do you really need to extend the incident table at all?

Unless you do not really need to apply different logic to the child other than just being a child,

then I would recommend just making a relation between incidents as is, to achieve the parent, child hierarchy.

If you really need different logic implemented for the child to interact in a distinct way compared to the parent,

then definitely rather extend the task table instead of the incident table as it is obviously no longer the same as an incident.

In our case we extended the task table, because the customer had so many requirements for the child compared to the parent incident itself. Like, the child were to have no SLA for instance.