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                                   [email protected]
Office of Information Technology
NC State University                              919-515-5432 Voice
Raleigh, NC  27695-7109                          919-513-1893 FAX

_______________________________________________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org
Platinum Sponsor:[email protected] ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"

Reply via email to