Preventing invalid parent-child relationships between Incidents and Requests

Products

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

Issue/Introduction

In Service Desk Manager 17.5, users may be able to create parent-child relationships between different ticket types (e.g., Incident and Request) even though this is not supported behavior. This issue is typically observed in environments with customizations.

Environment

Product: CA Service Management (SDM)

Version: 17.5

Conditions: Customized environments (e.g., modified list_cr.htmpl forms) or usage of SOAP/REST Web Services.

Cause

The parent-child relationship validation logic is enforced in the out-of-the-box (OOTB) forms. Customizations in forms (such as list_cr.htmpl) may override or bypass this validation logic. Additionally, certain Web Service calls may not consistently enforce these restrictions in all versions.

Resolution

Resolution:

To resolve this, follow these steps:

1. Validate against OOTB: Verify if the issue persists when using the OOTB forms. If the issue is not reproducible with the OOTB list_cr.htmpl form, your custom form is likely causing the behavior.
2. Update/Merge Custom Forms: Compare your custom list_cr.htmpl file with the OOTB version from SDM 17.5. Merge the necessary OOTB validation logic into your custom form.
3. Web Services (API) Usage: Note that parent-child relationships between incident and request are not supported. If you are creating these relationships via API (SOAP/REST), ensure your integration logic adheres to the expected SDM architecture, as there is no option to enable cross-type parent-child relationships. There is a defect in progress to prevent this issue to occur.