Reporting off a choice list field on a form

[Chris Petrone]

My organization has created a field on the task table called 'Governance Groups'. This is a choice list field with about 35 various groups created in it. They are using this field to pick various groups against a record so it flags it for review at the next meeting for that specific group so they can review it and determine if it is something they want to go ahead with.

The name/label of the group (Group A) matches the value of the group (Group A).

We are running into issues with reporting on this field however, Governance Groups contains... can pull in unwanted records or even nothing at all.

What would be the best course of action to change the way we have this setup?

I have seen this community article: Reporting on Lists – Part 3/3 on Conquer Challenging Reports by Leveraging the Now Platform

Will this be viable in my situation or do I need to look elsewhere?

[Marshall Parker]

Couple of thoughts - first off, if you are calling these "Groups" of some flavor I would encourage looking at re-engineering to create actual Groups [sys_user_group] and then the task field can be a reference to the groups table instead of a simple choice list.

This may lead you down the path to creating approval flows or lists that the members of each group can monitor/maintain, etc..

When reviewing the various Group reference fields that exist on an OOB task table (and the common child tables like incident, change_request, etc..) you may find that there is already a field that matches the business case of this type of governance group.

A second thought - if you have this data as a list (meaning multiple selection of governance groups on a single task record) then reporting gets a little more complicated and you may need to handle this data differently. Creation of a many to many list like documented on your linked community article is one viable method to dig into.