Unable to set value of SREL to NULL using REST web services

Products

• CA Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

It should be possible to set the value of an SREL attribute to NULL using REST web services using X-AttrsToNull.

However, when attempting to do so, the results are:

Error Code 400
Error message "com.ca.sdm.dal.parser.SyntaxException: Expected NULL_INT, NULL_STR, NULL_DATE, NULL_DUR or NULL_UUID, got: NULL"

An example to reproduce the issue follows: 

Method: PUT
Endpoint: http://sdmwsserver:8050
Resource: /caisd-rest/cr/400793
Media Type: application/xml
<cr>
</cr>

Header ... Value
X-AccessKey     1434133776
X-AttrsToNull  symptom_code

In the above example, 40073 is the ref_num of the ticket and "symptom_code" is an SREL attribute of the cr object.

It may be possible to work-around the issue by including the attribute in the payload XML as shown in the example below. However, this method is not guaranteed to work for all SREL attributes of all objects; as well, the method may not work after the code fix to defect DE53213 has been applied.

Media Type: application/xml
<cr>
<symptom_code></symptom_code>
</cr>

Environment

Reported Release : Service Desk Manager 17.0 on Linux

Component : SDM - REST Web Services

Reproduced also in: SDM 17.2.0.6 Windows

Cause

This issue is caused by a product defect. The defect ID is DE53213.

Resolution

To determine whether or not DE53213 has been fixed, please check the fix issues lists for the versions of the product that are being used in your environment.  If the defect is in the list, then it is fixed in the associated patch or version. For patches, the list should appear within the Release Notes section of the online documentation.

See previous sections for possible work-around.

Status Update on 2020-03-23: The fix is to be included in 17.2 rollup #8 (RU8, 17.2.0.8). 

Additional Information

See the section titled "Null Value in Update Operation" on the following page:

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/content/broadcom/techdocs/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/business-management/ca-service-management/17-1/reference/ca-service-desk-manager-reference-commands/technical-reference/rest-http-methods.html

Sample of a list of fixed issues in a patch:  https://techdocs.broadcom.com/content/broadcom/techdocs/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/business-management/ca-service-management/17-2/Release-Notes/CA-Service-Management-17_2_0_6-Release-Notes/Fixed-Issues---17_2_0_6.html  (Note: DE53213 is not in the list; thus it is not fixed in 17.2 RU6)