Integration of External Data Sources During Ticket Creation in CA Service Desk Manager

[Reinaldo Rivero]

We are seeking assistance with CA Service Desk Manager to determine if it is possible to populate fields in a ticket during its creation, prior to saving or submitting the ticket. Specifically, we want to know if we can input a STRING or INTEGER value into a field, which then queries data from an external application, and stores the resulting data in the mdb database as attributes of the ticket. 

Is it feasible or possible?

We know that we could do it with CA Process Automation once the ticket is created but, the customer would like to know if the above scenario is feasible or not.

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Reinaldo Rivero
IT Consultant @ IT Business Solutions DEF
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[Hemalatha Simhadri]

Hi,

I think you can use the "External System Ticket" field of a ticket object. Please refer the document on this field.

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/business-management/ca-service-management/17-4/using/problem-management.html

If you are looking for updating a specific field prior to saving the ticket, you can write some PRE_CI triggers to update the value.

Regarding input data type, if you are using "External System Ticket", this field accepts string type data.

Hope this helps.

Thanks & Regards,

Hema.

[Reinaldo Rivero]

Hi Hemalatha, thanks for the reply.

Question: 

With a PRE_CI trigger is it possible to run a query to an external data source to fill a field of the ticket with data extracted from the third party application, all this before saving the ticket? For example: during ticket creation, the analyst fills in a field of type string and with that value the trigger performs a query to extract some data related to the value and enter the new data in n fields of the ticket.

 

Best,

Reinaldo

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Reinaldo Rivero
IT Consultant @ IT Business Solutions DEF
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[Sebastian Nagy]

Hi Reinaldo,

The short answer is yes, but how would you connect to the external source? Think about it like: Can I implement what I'm looking for in a spel code? There is no direct DB connection i libraries, there are no WebServices or REST libraries ... SDM does make web service calls but it's not straight forward for an external user to use those libraries and not sure if it works for all the web service endpoints - something new that we didn't test.

A execution part of a trigger is basically s spel method and you are limited to what the spel method can do. If you are a more advanced developer and familiar with how you do it, is you can spin another process that would login to slump and accept BPMessages and then in your process you can do anything you want - JDBC or WebServices, all that matters is the support for BPMessaging to send the request to your process and then send the response to the calling spel method, then the spel method would only update the required fields before the save.

I would NOT recommend to really implement something like this before save, because this is a synchronous call. The response to the same request is not coming back to the caller until the save is actually performed. Any access to external systems would really slow down the save operation significantly. Think about the failure scenarios as well - do you want to fail the save if no BPMessage is received in X seconds? Or how long do you wait for a response?

I think this would be best handles as a POST_CI trigger - if you really don't want to use PAM, which is executed after the save is performed and the save request is responded. It doesn't matter if it takes 1 minute to pull the data - the user can process with his work and created new tickets.

I hope this makes sense to you and you can handle this, but this is some advanced customization.

Regards,
Sebastian

[Reinaldo Rivero]

Hi Sebastian,

For me it is crystal clear. I have no problem using PAM.
This possible configuration came from a customer request or idea. I didn't have this detail you explained but, I was pretty sure it would be an advanced customization. With PAM it would be easier to get or retrieve the data after saving the ticket.

I will explain it to the customer. 

Many thanks! @Sebastian Nagy

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Reinaldo Rivero
IT Consultant @ IT Business Solutions DEF
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