Affect User, Primary Contact and Reports
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I would like to start a discussion and solicit some opinions about what seems to be a fundamental change between HelpDesk 6.5 and ServiceDesk 7, also some insight on the Report Designer. In HD 6.5 the workitem table gave us two fields: contact_id and created_by_worker_id . In writing reports it was easy to see how many Incidents were open for any given Contact (contact_id) or how many Incidents were created by our Techs (created_by_worker_id ). I can’t get my head around translating what I knew and understood in HD6.5 to SD7. Why Primary Contact and Affected User. Why no Created By. I assume SD7 ‘Primary Contact’ is the equivalent to HD 6.5 created_ by_worker_id and SD7 ‘Affect User’ the equivalent to HD 6.5’s contact_id. Why, as far as I can tell, dump them both into the same DB Field (Display Name?)
When I look at the Reports that came out of the box, under Reports>Incident Management, I see two Reports both call ‘List Open Incidents By Contact’. When I go into ‘Edit Report’ the design looks the same. When viewing these two Reports, different info is exposed (id, first name, last name, title, date opened, priority and category1 for one and id, title, date opened, priority, category1 and employee id for the other), yet the fields in the Column area of the Designer are the same for both. Tickets are being counted twice: once for the Primary Contact and once for the Affect User (if there is one). If Management sees this Report they would think there are more open Tickets then there truly are. I have yet to figure out how to break out Primary Contact from Affect Users….no help in the Docs
I tried to create this report from scratch, when I move the ‘Process’ data type over to the right ‘Date Opened’ and ‘Id’ are not there to move up into columns area and what is with ‘Primary Email’ in the column area being in () and grayed out…..can’t make it so.
Thanks for the ear….Please fill free to add your yeas, nays or advice
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Apparently no takers huh ROO?
Apparently no takers huh ROO? I can help a bit. The grayed out columns are Group By fields and can be selected on the Options tab of the Edit Report dialog. If you wish to remove or add other group by fields you need to go there.
I would like to restate your first question if I may: Helpdesk 6 had an is_last column in the workitem table to indicate that this record is the most current set of data for a given incident. As you said usually (not always, but usually) you want just the most recent data returned for your report and Helpdesk made that easy with the is_last field, just add is_last = 1 (or something like that) to the report (Actually there were views setup that did that for us). In ServiceDesk I’m not sure if there is an option in the report generator tool for this, if so I can’t find it so I assume if we want reports with only one row per ticket returned we need to do the SQL ourselves.
So the question is how do we write a report that returns the latest data for an incident when our query is such that DISTINCT isn't adequate, e.g. add in Group Name?
I believe the data we need is in the ReportProcessHistory table in the TimeOfExecution field of the row with the latest date for a given SessionID. I haven't tried to write the SQL yet, hoping I'm missing something.
Anyone out there try this yet who wants to throw in and help?
Thanks
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Top of the Morning
Thanks for 'taking' :)....in both reports, under options, group by is 'display name'......still a mystery
Currently, I do all our reporting for HD6.5 in SQL Reporting Services. I find I have much more control and our DBA was not a big fan of the 'Views' that are used when reporting from with HD6.5. I was hoping with SD7 to use the Reporting Tool.....at the moment, not so sure
We support 1400+ Stores and 700+ Home Office Team Members....the vast number of 'Open Incident' are done by our Support Center....so in our case the 'Primary User' will be the Tech opening the Incident and the 'Affected User' will be the Store or Team Member....I like the HD 6.5 concept of 'Open By' and 'Contact'. As far as I can tell both 'Primary User' and 'Affected User' are being stored in the same field in SD7 (with the help of others...... in the ReportProcessContact Table there is a field called 'Contact Type' which may help to unravel the issue). Would like someone from Symantec to add some comments as to the background on this decision.
Thanks
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