What table and field stores the "Description" that is specified in CI Class Manager?

[Paul Coste2]

The CI Class Manager contains a field for providing a Description of the class.  The out of box classes in ServiceNow do not provide any data in this field.  This field was added along with the CI Class Manager, but I cannot figure out where it exists?  I have looked in sys_glide_object, sys_db_object, and sys_class_name, tables and I cannot find any dictionary entries for the Description field.  I would like to populate this field and make use of in in managing the configuration model in my CMDB.

[Paul Coste2]

Yeah, a bit of a rhetorical question I guess.  Like other areas of the platform, it seems like this was put into place as a carrot, without providing a fully thought out implementation.  And like other areas of the platform, it begs further implementation work by the customer, but requires that the customer own the risk of maintaining these enhancements and later going back to out of box once the implementation is enhanced.  In the meantime, I will plan on updating the class descriptions for out of box classes that are part of the model.  This information will be very helpful for configuration owners who are looking for information about what classes to use for what purpose.

[michaelfromgerm]

Hello ,

Is there any way to extend the cmdb_class_info table (CI Class Manager) or any other known solutions to allow e.g. the following:

- identify (only) the classes being used by the Company

- Categorize a Class Process related (like category / group by 'Workplace - ' or 'Infrastructure')

- use these Attributes within reporting to group or filter by theses Attributes ?

The extension to allow a Description on the cmdb_class_info table is pointing in the correct direction - but how do i use these Information in Reports or Lists ? Seems not to be possible. So it stays a human read information only.

I read the article about adding an Environment field on the cmdb_ci, but this needs to be maintained on every CI Record and seems not to be the most effective way. We are running about 600K CIs maintained in about 40 Classes used by 6 Countries ...so focus should be on the 'Meta' class management

Let me know your experiences.

thanks a lot and enjoy your day

Michael

[Paul Coste2]

As for how to document the classes and attributes that your company uses, that is one of my primary use cases as well.  I had thought of customizing the class info table by adding some more columnd, and then thought I might just encode key-value pairs into the description (but field length is too short anyway).  I don't see the harm in adding a few columns, so I'm still considering, but would like to know where ServiceNow is going with this. 

There is an 'active' column on the sys_dictionary table.  So if you are not using a CI class, you can set active to false, which prevents new CIs being created for that class, but does not prevent updating existing CIs.  This is logical.  But I have only done this with my own classes that I am deprecating.  There could be unexpected effects on out of CI classes.  Also the active column is available for CI attribute entries as well, though I am not sure it has any effect on the read/write of the values on the CI attributes.

To display the metadata about a class, there are a few links to hop between to get from the CI to the Table to the CI Class Metadata.  I've thought about creating a Database View and a Related List, but that seems a bit clunky, and it is probably best to just write a script include to obtain the data using the Table API.  I'd be interested if anyone else out there has looked into this.

UPDATE: Setting the Active attribute on the attributes of a class will actually have some useful functions, namely that the attributes will no longer be available to add to lists or forms, which can be really helpful.  This is not always the case and it is inconsistently implemented in various parts of the UI, but just this affect alone is useful.