Workflow and ServiceDesk Community

Ran into something yesterday and I would like someone to confirm it, if possible. It's pretty rare that an incident is reopened around here, but one was reopened yesterday and was almost immediately closed again because the technician didn't realize it was a reopen. (Yes, they somehow didn't read the incident title which clearly says "[Reopen]" on it!) I started poking around the process and the Incident Management Reopen workflow and it appeared to me that the comments during the reopen don't actually get used anywhere! This seems very strange as the comments field is required.

I went ahead and changed the workflow to prepend the comments to the incident description and append the comments to the item that gets added to the process history.

I'm using 7.5.1, not MP1, but I'm guessing this is consistent between all 7.5 releases. So is it just me, or is this kinda broken? Can someone check their setup and make sure I'm not crazy here?

Reopen flow is open to modifications in 7.5 (%ProgramFiles%\Symantec\Workflow\WorkflowProjects\SD.IncidentManagementSimple.Reopen.package). Looking at the project, you are right - Comment is not actually used anywhere.

My suggestion would be to open this project, add another component similar to 'Add Comment to New Ticket' (lower right corner of the flow) or just edit the existing one to contain the comment. Then publish the modified project.

To add the comment to the existing Process Message - You want to see the comment in the Process Message body so you can add it to 'Add Comment to New Ticket' component, 'Configuration' Tab, the 'Information To Store' field - the variable with comment is called VarReopenComments. An example with the necessary places highlighted is on the screenshot:

Alternatively, to add another separate Process Message with the comment you can clone the 'Add Comment to New Ticket' component and place it right after the original one, modifying the 'Message Brief', 'Information To Store' and possibly other fields as needed. That will result in two messages in the new incident - the default one waying it was reopened and a second one saying whatever you make it to say.

I'm actually quite glad to know that I wasn't missing something in the worfklow. Regarding the modification, that's almost exactly why I had done, so that's always good.

I'm having a really hard time coming up with a justification for this behavior out of the box. This should really be changed in the next service pack.

You are absolutely correct.

Along with writing a post here, I also reported this up to our Devs to make sure it gets fixed in the next version.