What is the maximum number of Properties that can be created for a Category or Request Area?

Products

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

Issue/Introduction

CA Service Desk users make wide usage of Category or Request Areas Properties.

Some of the customers tend to use this functionality as a tool to document too much information, as a very detailed Risk Survey would do.

However, this is not the intent of the Request Area or Category. There are a few limitations when using it.

 

Environment

SDM 17.3 and 17.4

All Supported Operating Systems

Resolution

Properties are added in the Category or Area definition, in the Administration tab.

When creating Properties for a Category, SDM does not limit the number of properties to be created.

In the example below, we have 25 properties:

In this scenario, when the Request Area/Category is used in an Incident, for example, the Properties tab may show all them:

When editing the ticket, SDM will allow to add value up to 23 properties only: 

This limitation exists because SDM has been certified to work with at most 23 properties.

Additional Information

The first question that comes in mind is: can the form be customized to make the other Properties available for editing?

Broadcom Support does not recommend that to be done.

A few reasons for not customizing the form are:

• SDM may present slowdown when displaying the ticket page.
• For cases where Service Desk was upgraded from previous releases which already had customizations to accommodate more than 23 Properties, you could face problems when saving tickets using that Category. One reason could be because if there are mandatory Properties for the Category in use beyond the limit, it is not possible to edit them unless the customization is reviewed.
• There have been cases where the customization was kept and more than 40 Properties were added to a Category. Service Desk presented serious performance issues, with domsrvr process growing in size and causing an overall performance issue to the users connected to that specific process. The solution customer adopted was to use a maximum of 40 Properties (because he himself identified that up to 40 properties SDM didn't present any problem).

Important Notice: 

Broadcom Services/Partners (not Broadcom Support) can provide help and support for customizations.

Other source of help when dealing with customizations is the CA SDM Community