Ben, This has been a feature of the system for quite a while now. 7.5 most definitely, 7.0 I think so, before that, I am not sure.
I did a quick search in the on-line documentation and found a section of the document titled "Working with the Request ID field" This section clearly calls out the possibility of setting this field to a length of 1 to achieve the affect you are commenting on. I do have to agree however that in the section "Core Fields" where each of the core fields is described, it does not include the extra line or two describing the affect of setting the length to 1. So, that is a good doc bug/enhancement you can submit. I didn't look further at other places to see if it does or does not discuss this topic or even whether it is appropriate for that discussion in other areas. But, the key is that the capability exists to control the ID and get no leading 0s if that is what you want. It does mean that sorting by the Request ID is no longer in clean order because the request ID is a character field and without leading 0s things do not sort "numerically" correctly as the number of characters in the value changes. But it is your choice. Note: No lead 0's can work with a prefix as well. The prefix will be present but no lead 0s between the prefix and the Request ID number. Doug Mueller ________________________________ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Ben Chernys Sent: Monday, March 14, 2011 10:42 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: FYI undocumented feature / quirk - Request ID (field 1) of length 1 means length is 15 and no zero fill ** Hi Folks, Just discovered a case where a request id (field '1') had a database length of 1 - one of the Task Template schemas in ITSM 7.6. This is valid and means that the length is 15 and there is no leading zero fill. The old Admin tool had a nice error message when setting a field 1 to say 2 bytes. I can certainly find nowhere that this is documented including all .h files. The doc says a field id 1 must be between 5 and 15 bytes long and mentions nothing about the effect of setting it to 1. Doc bug? Cheers Ben Chernys Senior Software Architect Software Tool House Inc. Canada / Deutschland / Germany Mobile: +49 171 380 2329 GMT + 1 + [ DST ] Email: ben.cher...@softwaretoolhouse.com<mailto:ben.cher...@softwaretoolhouse.com> Web: www.softwaretoolhouse.com<http://www.softwaretoolhouse.com/> Check out Software Tool House's free Diary Editor. Meta-Update, our premium ARS Data tool, lets you automate your imports, migrations, in no time at all, without programming, without staging forms, without merge workflow. http://www.softwaretoolhouse.com/ _attend WWRUG11 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
