CA Service Management

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  • 1.  SDM 14.1, manual notify intermittent error on screen load

    Posted Jul 13, 2016 06:47 AM

    I have an analyst reporting that he gets this error on some tickets (not all) when the manual notify screen loads, and he cannot go any further: 

     

    "Invalid attribute name: 'recip' provided for contact lookup"

     

    The contacts that are defined to load as the 'Available Recipients' are:  Affected End User, Assignee, Group and Requester.  Typically he is changing the group in the ticket to his group first, and then clicking on Activities/Manual Notify.  What is also strange about this is that he says he doesn't save the ticket after changing the group, but when the manual notify screen loads it shows the new group name in the list of 'Available Recipients' --- It always shows the previous group for me since I haven't yet saved the ticket.

     

    When I try the same thing on the same ticket, I'm not able to reproduce this error.  Sometimes when he clears his browser cache and tries again on the same ticket, the issue goes away for a time but then comes back.  He is running Windows 10, and IE 11.   Has anyone ever seen this error before? 

     

    A few months ago, I did add the below 3 lines of code to the nf.htmpl form to throw an error when the manual notify screen loads if the contents of the 'Message Text' field is already maxed out at 4000 characters, and allow you to edit it to remove some text -- (Because otherwise you couldn't do anything on the screen and it wasn't telling you why.)  But I would think if this change caused this issue, I would be able to reproduce it on the same tickets he gets the error on.

     

    (line 26) var test=0;

    (line 270) test=(document.main_form.initial_msgtxt.value.replace(/\n/g, "\r\n").length-4000);

    (line 271) if(document.main_form.initial_msgtxt.value.replace(/\n/g, "\r\n").length > 4000)

    (line 272) alert("You have maxed out the limit of 4000 characters in the Message Text field.  Please remove "+test+" characters before proceeding.");

     

    Thanks,

    Tammy



  • 2.  Re: SDM 14.1, manual notify intermittent error on screen load

    Posted Jul 13, 2016 09:48 AM

    Hi Tammy,  I did some quick research internally on this one but was not able to find much.  Are there any errors in the stdlogs on the server which the user is logged into when this occurs?  Its odd that its intermittent, along it being odd that when you change the group then go to manual notify it shows the old group, but his shows the new group when doing the same thing - so I am not sure what may be different here - this part could be a caching issue of some sort.  Just out of curiosity, have you checked with any other analysts to see if they have the same issue?   May give us some clues there.    Aside from that, I would say to open a support case for this one so one of us can take a look at it with you and maybe run some logging to see whats going on behind the scenes.  We may need fiddler installed on the user's machine as the issue may be on the browser side and not on the server side, but I cant tell at this point.

    Hope this helps a bit to maybe get things going towards getting this resolved for you.

    Thanks,

    Jon I.



  • 3.  Re: SDM 14.1, manual notify intermittent error on screen load
    Best Answer

    Posted Jul 13, 2016 02:41 PM

    Hi Jon,

    Thanks for the feedback. There weren't any errors in the log that I could see that looked related to this.  I had a few people try testing this yesterday, but none of them were getting the error.  However, we had another person today report getting this same error on other tickets, and even though I still couldn't reproduce it on these tickets, someone on my team was able to.  What she also saw when she got this error was something very strange happening with the 'Contact' field on the manual notify screen (where you can look up a contact to put in the to or cc box), so it seems like the error was referencing that field.  She first saw that the auto-suggest wasn't working in the contact field, but then when she clicked on the 'Contact' link above the field, it took her to some other strange screen that she said almost looked like a ticket screen.  She said it's hard to explain the screen she saw, but it had the word 'assignee' in the title.  (I didn't see it, so I'm sorry that I can't explain it any better than that....)

     

    Anyway, I decided to back out of those 3 lines of code I had added to the nf.htmpl form, and now she's not getting the error and neither is the person who reported the issue.

     

    But here's another really strange thing about all of this.  The reason I added those 3 lines of code is because in 12.7, when the ticket description text that gets pulled into the 'message text' field of the manual notify screen was so large that it maxed out that field as soon as the page was loaded, it would still let you address the notification and click the 'notify' button, and then it would throw an error saying you have to remove some of the text.  What I had found was happening in 14.1 was that the manual notify screen was completely unresponsive if the message text field was already maxed out when the screen loaded.  It didn't give you an error or message telling you what was wrong, and it wouldn't allow you to modify the message text field to remove the text so that you could continue.  It just appeared like the manual notify screen was broken. (See support ticket 00372504: Manual Notify maximum 4000 characters, but no error message).  So that's why I added those 3 lines.  But -- when I backed out of those 3 lines of code just now , and tested with a ticket that had 4000 characters in the ticket description field to be sure the initial error was no longer occurring, the manual notify screen is now letting me address the notification, and then when I click 'Notify' it tells me that I need to remove some text from the message text field -- Just like it used to in 12.7.

     

    So confusing....


    Thanks.

    Tammy