Thanks to LJ and Ben. You were both correct. Logging revealed that
there was a filter that was explicitly setting the Status field
without checking to see if it was different from it's current value.
A simple qualification on the filter has corrected the problem.
You guys are great! Now how do I explain to my users that we have
10 years of questionable Status-History data. I guess if this is
the first time that anyone has noticed, then the impact may not
be too large. :-)
Thanks again.
Larry
On Jun 18, 2009, at 9:49 AM, LJ Longwing wrote:
Larry,
Are either of the subsequent updates setting the status, even if
they are
setting it to Owned? And you may find that it's a bug in the
version you
are running....you are about 3-4 years out of support though...
On Jun 18, 2009, at 9:49 AM, Ben Chernys wrote:
If the Status is assigned the value it already has, this is
considered a
Status update and will change the Status History values. Otherwise,
this
behaviour is not what I have seen. Check that workflow does not
make an
assignment to the Status field including a redundant assignment. Run
logging. Also, the modified date field should reflect the same time
as the
status history update.
In any event, this field is generally of limited use since it does
NOT track
status changes but rather only tracks the last change to any
particular
status.
Cheers
Ben
Ben Chernys
Senior Software Architect
Software Tool House Inc.
Canada / Deutschland / Germany
Mobile: +49 171 380 2329 GMT + 1 + [ DST ]
Email: mailto:ben.cher...@softwaretoolhouse.com
Web: http://www.softwaretoolhouse.com
A free notepad for Diary fields:
http://www.softwaretoolhouse.com/downloads/DiaryFieldEditor.htm
An ARS API scripting tool used for migrations, integrations, imports,
reports, extracts, batch jobs:
http://www.softwaretoolhouse.com/products/SthMupd
-----Original Message-----
From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList)
[mailto:arsl...@arslist.org] On Behalf Of L G Robinson
Sent: June 18, 2009 3:40 PM
To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG
Subject: Unexpected updates to the Status-History field
Hi All,
I have a question about the Status-History field. Specifically, I am
confused about when this field gets updated. My system:
ARS 5.1.2 Patch 1313 on Solaris 8 (Sun OS 5.8) ARSperl 1.71 (API 4)
and Perl
5.006001 (solaris)
According to the BMC documentation:
"The Status field (Field ID 7) enables you to track the different
states a
request moves through in its life cycle. The meaning of each
individual
state helps define the workflow process and you can define any
number of
states. In addition to keeping track of each state of a request, AR
System
keeps additional information with the Status field called status
history.
Status history includes the user name of the person who last changed
the
state of the request and the date and time that the change occurred."
The way I read this, the Status-History for a particular status
should only
be updated when the value of the Status field (state, as used above)
changes. However, I am seeing that the Status-History for a particular
Status value is being updated even when the Status has not changed.
Example:
The Status was manually set to "Owned" (from "Assigned") using the
Windows
client and the Status-History shows the following correct entry:
Owned.Time: 6/18/2009 8:31:36 AM
Owned.USER: nlil
A couple of minutes later, I added some text to a long text field and
updated the record. I did not change the value of the Status field,
yet the
Status-History field now contains:
Owned.Time: 6/18/2009 8:34:05 AM
Owned.USER: nlil
As part of our normal processing, a Perl script ran a few minutes
later and
sent an email acknowledgement to the customer.
The Perl script uses ARSperl to read various records to collect the
relevant
information and updates the call log (long text
field) to note that the ack. was sent. Subsequent to the Perl script
completing, the Status-History field has been updated yet again,
even though
the Perl script did not update the Status
field:
Owned.Time: 6/18/2009 8:39:37 AM
Owned.USER: Demo
It was my belief (up until this behavior was pointed out to me) that
neither
of the last two updates to the call record should have updated the
Status-History values for the Owned status unless the call had moved
out of
the Owned status and then back into that status again. But that is
not the
case here. The Status has remained "Owned" through each of the two
updates
and yet the Status-History continues to be updated.
Is this expected behavior? Can anyone point out what I am missing?
Thanks.
Larry
Larry Robinson n...@ncsu.edu
Office of Information Technology
NC State University 919-515-5432 Voice
Raleigh, NC 27695-7109 919-513-1893 FAX
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