Updating Report Owner / Creator

[Scott Jordheim]

Hello, if something happens where I need to update the report owner / creator, how would I go about doing this?

My end goal is changing who has overall rights to the report outside of report_admin or admin. The new report owner would have the report show up in their "My Reports" and be able to edit / save edits as if they just made the report today.

What was mentioned in previous Community posts was changing the User field on the report, but as others mentioned, this will only change who the report is shared with, not who can actually edit it.

I noticed the created_by_user field, but it is currently read-only on the list level. The UI Policy to make reporting fields read-only doens't mention this particular field. If I try to change it from the report's file properties, nothing really seems to happen either.

[Michael Ritchie]

Glad to help.  From my experience the Report table can grow massively over time.  If you don't put automation or process in place to keep it clean, it will become a room like the attic in your house with a bunch of junk.  Some customers are putting automation in place when a user becomes inactive it searches for records assigned and owned by them and flags them or changes the value.

You can always view the Report Executions (report_executions) table to view the last time reports have been run and use that date to know whether to keep the report around or not.

Please mark any post as helpful or the correct answer to your question if applicable so others viewing may benefit.

[Scott Jordheim]

Thanks! I’ve been thinking about doing something similar, but would definitely need to just bring them to light, rather than changing anything in the reports themselves (aside from the owner). Part of this will be addressed when we upgrade to London and can better control who can actually make reports. (Didn’t want to design custom ACLs if we didn’t have to. More work during upgrades and what not.)

I’m going to keep digging to see if there is an easy way to change that without having to open the list itself open to editing through the list controls step mentioned above or custom scripting needing to be run for each report. There has to be some way to do this, as I can quite easily change the owner on a dashboard for example. I know reports could run into issues if they are scheduled out under X person’s name, but in those cases, we would just delete or remake them rather than worry about it.

My remaining goal at this point would be to change the report owner to update who is allowed to make changes / delete a report when and if needed.

[Michael Ritchie]

What do you mean by this...

My remaining goal at this point would be to change the report owner to update who is allowed to make changes / delete a report when and if needed.

If you want to provide a facility to update a report owner you can always create a record producer that prompts for the report and shows current owner and then prompts for new owner.  Then you can control who has access this record producer via user criteria.  Record producers are a very powerful feature of the platform that I have used for all sorts of admin type things.

[Tracy Davis]

I have tried this and have not been able to actually update the Created by field (which is the owner). The only way we've gotten around it is I impersonate the person and insert and stay on the report and create a new version under their user ID - or if it's a more experienced user, I've walked them thru the process.

[Michael Ritchie]

Tracy,

Created By is a system field added to all tables along with Updated By.  Created By is not the owner of a report. A field called Created by user (created_by_user) is a reference and stores who created the actual report and the User (non-reference) stores the SysID of the user who has access to the report.  To test my theory out, I created a report as ITIL user:

I want to transfer the ownership to Beth Anglin and to confirm she has no reports:

I created a simple record producer that prompts for report and new owner:

Here is the script in the record producer:

// Upon submit update the report user and created by user fields
var reportRec = new GlideRecord("sys_report");
reportRec.get(producer.report);
reportRec.user = producer.new_owner;
reportRec.created_by_user = producer.new_owner;
reportRec.update();

// Since we want to update existing Abort inserting a new report
current.setAbortAction(true);

Once I submit the record producer notice Beth now has ITIL Test in her list:

And ITIL user does not: