pdm_load -a causes ticket number gap

Products

• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

We ran

pdm_load -a -f input-file.txt

to update some incidents and later we found that the incident number has a big gap--before this running command, the largest incident number was 26 and after running this command, the new incident number now is 6628 that has a big gap.  We would like to know root cause.

Environment

CA Service Desk Manager all versions

Cause

the input-file.txt contains the wrong and big incident number(ref_num)

Resolution

pdm_load -a will update the matching tickets according to the id of the ticket, not the ticket number(ref_num).

If you have a wrong and big ticket number(ref_num) in the input-file.txt, Service Desk Manager will update this ticket number to this big one and once Service Desk Manager restarts, the next ticket number will start from this large ticket number + a small jump that is less than 50. As such, if input-file.txt contains a big ticket number mistakenly, after Service Desk Manager restarts, the new ticket number will jump with a large gap.

For example, if the input-file contains

TABLE Call_Req
    active_flag ... id ... ref_num
    ... type urgency 
    { "1" ,..."400101" ,... ,"6626",
    ...,"I" ,"4" }

and in this case, by some mistake, the 26 becomes 6626. And after 

pdm_load -a -f input-file.txt

pdm_load will update this ticket according to the id field(400101), including updating the ticket number from 26 to 6626. Thus, once Service Desk Manager restarts, the new ticket number will be larger than 6626, which causes a gap in ticket number.

The bottom line: don't change the ticket number via pdm_load -a. Or you could see a gap in the ticket number.

 

Additional Information

Key Control

pdm_load--Add, Update, and Delete Database Records