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...
-----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of L G Robinson Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 7:40 AM To: [email protected] 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 [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" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Platinum Sponsor:[email protected] ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
