DougA

When CIs came in I redesigned our giant list of services into 6 or so Services and Configuration Items. The details Form has been tailored to the Service so the user management service has a different details form from the Hardware service. Each CI has a custom form to collect task specific information. In an least one CI we MUST be able to edit the custom information. Research has show that the custom form data cannot be edited but it can be included in the details form and edited there. I'd already modified the custom form data to map each custom field to h_custom_x so I could include the information in an email. Happy days I thought BUT then I realised that the details form applies to the service and not the CI. So here's the conundrum. How do you display custom information and associated labels on a CI basis and allow the editing of the content? HELP! Doug

Sorry to be a pest but if this isn't correct way of requesting an improvement could someone point me in the right direction

I completely agree. Making questions visible if a condition is true would streamline the data collection element. Thanks Doug

Hi @Steven Boardman Thanks for that. I've turned off the tentativeAuthorisation setting and I've been able to save and activate without error. Doug

Well I've managed to clear the error by ticking the "Enable Tentative Authorisation" and setting the experimental.enableTentative on. I definitely don't want tentative authorisations but I can't modify the BP without it. I'm more than a little confused by this as I didn't have this problem until I modified the BP this morning.

Rats. I was hoping to be able to display a formatted date. My idea was to use the date/time picker to put an incident on hold until that date but also include the date it in an email to the affected users.

I made a small change to a Business process and now I'm getting an error. I took the mods out but as I'm still getting the error I must have changed something else. The error is Can anyone shed any light on what I should be looking for? Thanks Doug

I'm trying to send an email with the a date collected from a custom field. Is there a way to display the value as anything other than a UTC? 2017-03-07T00:00:00.000Z isn't exactly readable :-)

That's so close to my suggestion. For each date allow both a base date (explicit or a variable) and a duration. Opens a world of opportunities allowing tasks to be created a given amount of time before or after a date.

@Steven Boardman Thanks for assist. I've modified the custom form, the business process to use the custom fields instead of the answers. Added the custom fields into the template and it works! Thanks for guidance Doug

We're using custom forms extensively to provide context sensitive questions in Service Config Items. I'm now working towards emailing notifications to the relevant teams but can't figure out how to get the information from the custom form into the template. Any guidance? Your help, as ever, is appreciated. Regards Doug

I cannot find a way to put a request on hold until a specified date within BPM. As far as I can see the on hold period doesn't allow a date to be entered at all, only a duration from the current time. We would like to suggest an improvement to the update request task, Place on Hold to allow a date or variable to be provided. We'd further like to suggest that both a date (defaulting to today) and duration can be specified for all tasks that calculate a date. In MariaDb the ADDDATE function Calculates the date from the start date plus the duration and even allows negative intervals to be specified. For instance if the start date is set to 1/4/17 and the duration is -1 week this would set the task start date as 25/3/17. Hey presto we have a warning notice! Leave the date blank and enter a duration and it operates as now. Enter a date and leave the duration blank (or zero) to set a specific date. Any thoughts?

I'm working on my outage process and I need to set up a decision for each of 50 different fire stations. Every station has to be tested and if the condition is true it creates a connection for the station. If no match it simply bypasses and goes onto the next station. What I've found is that you can't have two inputs into a decision node so I've created a dummy task as a workaround. Is this best way to do it? If so, is there a truly dummy task? Alternatively I could set up a series of parallel processes with perhaps 5 decisions in each. It certainly seems a more elegant solution but is it a better solution? Thanks Doug

Sometimes you can't see for looking! That's mainly because I was looking in Control Panel! Thanks Doug

Ok, I give up. Where or how do I add new contacts? Thanks Doug

@Dan MunnsThanks Dan but unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem for us. An outage could affect any combination of headquarters, control rooms and 50 odd fire stations each with 4 watches. I think that makes about 2400 permutations! If the Add Connection worked for basic users I could set up 60 odd decisions to add individual users to the affected/interested connections. Doug

The notices come from many different sources so we accept we'll have to obtain and log the information manually. The incident can be put on hold but only for a specified duration. It would be a major improvement if a variable could be selected for a specific date as is done in Lifespan settings in Human Tasks, Authorisation tasks and others. Even better would be to have the base date AND duration in all date fields.

@VictorWow! that was fast! Thanks for the update. When there's no response it feels as though the issue might have fallen through the cracks. I'm glad it hasn't. Thanks Doug

@Victorany feedback on this?

Thanks for that. You've confirmed that my understanding of connections is correct. However, I'd like to accomplish the same through Business Processes. I've already reported one problem in that basic users can't be selected in BP, Add Connection. Nor can I see any way of sending an email to all interested/affected users through BP. Any suggestions? Doug

When we receive a notification of system outage we need to inform a number of different people under different circumstances so I'm trying to find the best way to accomplish this. I guess I've got to collect the info during the progressive capture and then email from the business process. I've tried a number of different approaches but none of them seem viable. I think linking the basic user to the incident has the most potential providing it can link basic users as it can in the form. But can an email be sent to multiple addressees? If so, how do you set them up? Thanks Doug

@Steven Boardman this is a similar issue to the one I've been finding in setting dates in If the date subroutine was modified to have the duration variables as well as a date field that allows a variable to be used but defaults to current date. Now All of the bases are covered. If a specific date/time is required then enter it in a custom form date/time control. Then use the AnswerN as the base date in the schedule date field without a duration. if you want the date to be a fixed period in the future then leave the base date blank (as now) and enter the durations. The really useful bit comes when you use a base date with a duration. Set a task to occur 1 week after the base date or even 1 day before. We'd love this as it would allow us to automate the notification of work to be carried out. At the moment we're manually informing control whenever a piece of work needs to be carried out on an appliance as it's not available for a 999 call.

Ok, I'm stuck again. I'm trying to use the request connections, add connections to add another user to the incident. I've set Connection Type = Manual = Interested. When I try to add the CoWorker I'm only being offered the members of the support group, none of the basic users. In the info bubble it says "the userid of the co-worker or basic user to be added as a request connection". Is this a misunderstanding on my part, an error in the info bubble or a bug in the system? Thanks Doug

Hi @DeadMeatGF, Notifications normally come in via email and we process them manually but I'm trying to automate the process. For example, Virgin has advised us of a system outage on the weekend of 25/26th. We then collect all of the relevant info and send out an advance notification. Service Provider Contact Info Date/Time From Date/Time To Which systems are affected Who is Affected - everyone, some or all of the fire stations. If a fire station is affected then we also have to inform Control. If Control will be affected then we also have to notify our failover partner fire services. All of this has to be recorded so putting it into Hornbill makes good sense. Having the ability to then put the incident on hold until the specified date/time From would be great. At the moment you can only put an incident on hold for a duration which is a bit of a pain. An improvement would be allow a variable as per most other duration fields but the ideal would be have a base date and a duration for all date calculation fields. Yes, I could accomplish this by adding extra data/time fields but even then it would be great to be able to calculate the date.

Has any consideration ever been given to the potential of limited interaction via email? I don't know enough about coding in email messaging but it would be seriously cool to have a user reply to an email and have their choice acted upon in the BP. Because of the nature of the fire service it's difficult for users to get onto a portal but they can quickly and easily respond to an email.