Missing Funnel Icon - No Fun!

[G24]

As an Admin, under "System Definition - Filters"...

I can see and manage hundreds of thousands of filters. Luckily, because there are so many in the list view, I of course have the ability to Filter the Filters.  (I know, it's a little bit confusing.  I'm looking at filters, and I'm using the Funnel icon to filter those filters.)  The list view looks like this (note the funnel icon):

But one of our power users, our CMDB Admin, does NOT have this ability.  Note the missing funnel icon:

I tried to use "Debug Security Rules" to locate some missing Role or some Rule which is causing this behavior.  Could it be one of these???

My specific questions are:

1) Is it "By Design" that only Admin users have the ability to Filter the Filters?  If that is the case, how would I know that?  Where would I see that in the ServiceNow documentation?

2)  Is there a reasonable way I can override the default behavior and allow our power user to be able to Filter the Filters?

3)  Was I on the right track with the "Debug Security Rules"?  Or is there maybe some other, easier way to find out why a user is missing a UI component like the funnel icon?

Thanks!!!

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

The ability to filter can also be controlled within "List Control", which in this case...for the sys_filter table, it is. It's limited to 'admin' only.

Please navigate to your sys_filter table list view, right-click any column header and choose "Configure > List Control" and then note the filter roles being applied. You can remove that role if necessary:

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[G24]

@Allen A Sir, you are both a gentleman, and a scholar.  Thank you!

That was so easy.  But I wasted like 2 hours on it.  😕

Could you possibly further educate me...

A)  Assuming that is out-of-the-box behavior on that List View, do you have any idea WHY it would be like that?  What is the value in preventing users from being able to filter lists?  There are MANY records in that list.  Filtering is kind of necessary for it to have any value.

B)  Also, although I should have just "known" about the List Control configuration menu option, I'm kind of bothered by the fact that I was not able to zero in on that using "Debug Security Rules".  I tried limiting the role to "Problem Admin" instead of "Admin", and then looking for the corresponding Security Rule under the List View. And that failed.  Nothing shoed up that I could see.  Is it because settings like this are not implemented as "Security Rules"?  Would there have been some other way to locate it?

Thanks again, if you can shed any additional light on this!

[Allen Andreas · Accepted solution]

Haha, no problem. You did great work trying to figure it out so it helped narrow down what it could be and I wanted to verify it and show proof.

I assume due to the vast amount of roles allowed within the "System Definition" application, ServiceNow intended for this specific table to only allow admins to set filters on it because of the potential for the amount of people using it? This seems common as a tactic to prevent users from creating their own filters which may differ from something administratively set. So it suppresses filtering and the breadcrumb from showing up and forces users in to starting with the base presentation of the data. I'm not endorsing it, just what is normally done if you use it. There's a camp of people who don't like people to use the filter options and then there's others who don't mind.

Out of ALL tables out of box with ServiceNow and even including others that I've activated...like ITBM and SecOps...only 4 tables have list filter roles specified on them:

• asmt_metric_category
• cmdb_running_process
• sys_filter
• sys_security_acl

So it's not very common and I've never personally had a use case yet where it's needed to restrict it. There are threads on the forums though where people have asked how to do it, so I guess there's some people doing it.

As far as debugging security rules, yeah, this wouldn't show up in that capacity as that is solely looking at ACLs.

Of all the debug tools available, I don't see any that actually apply to list control. It's one of those rarer topics within ServiceNow and not widely used. There definitely should be something to help remind people that this is a "thing", but there isn't anything specific that calls it out.

Anyways, sorry I can't help answer it much more than that, but it's definitely one of those "wonky" things about ServiceNow that normally users don't come across, you just happened to need it for one of the only 4 tables that seem to use this feature, haha.

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[G24]

You're the best, @Allen A .  Thank you.