Impact of setting a field to be inactive on the dictionary

[mbourla]

On the dictionary there's an "Active" field.  I want to know exactly what the impact is in ServiceNow of setting a field to be inactive on the dictionary, using that active field.  I'm thinking here specifically of fields on CIs, or on tasks such as change requests, but it's a general question.

The docs page here says "When this check box is cleared, the field is not used by the system".  It doesn't say exactly what that means though.

I believe that setting a field to be inactive hides it in the UI, so that users can't see it in lists of fields e.g in filter conditions.  This is a key requirement we have, to hide fields that users don't need to be aware of because we don't actually use them in our instance.

But does it do anything else too?  Can it break any functionality to make a field inactive?  Is it OK to make OOTB fields inactive?

There was an earlier post Setting fields of a table to active=false [sys_dictionary.active] that asked the same thing but it never got answered.  So raising it again now, in the hope that someone can provide a definitive answer, ideally someone from ServiceNow.

Thanks!

[Kieran Anson]

Hi,

When a field is marked as inactive, it's removed from views,reporting,lists etc. Essentially its removed from the UI. However marking a field as inactive still allows it to function via the GlideRecord API (reading and writing to the field).

Without further testing, I can't confirm whether other functionality is impacted 

[mbourla]

Thanks, Kieran - that's my understanding too.

But when we tried this many years ago, I recall it caused some sort of issues, which I can't now remember details of, so we didn't set them to inactive in the end.  I tried other things like read ACLs to hide them in the UI but in the end I prefixed the field labels with "{UNUSED} " which forced them down to the bottom of lists of fields when sorted alphabetically. That's the convention we've stuck with since then, at least in CMDB which is my area. We now want to hide fields on change requests and making the fields inactive would be easiest, as long as it doesn't cause problems. So that's why I'm hoping I can get a definitive answer from someone at ServiceNow. 

[Kieran Anson]

Opening a support case will be your best bet for an official answer which you can fallback on. I call those sort of answers my "receipts" - so when stuff does go wrong, I can show the account manager and get a bit of heightened support. The community is more for friendly people to give an answer, it comes with no warranty 

[mbourla]

Yes you're probably right.  I'm pretty sure I did raise a support case for this many years ago but that's when it was HI, and you can't see those HI tickets via https://support.servicenow.com/.  I'll raise another case now, and will report back on what they say.