Use Inactive Records to Filter

When people applied filters to a view or report, they were not always able to select from all the records of their support organization. The suggestions that would be offered when looking up records to define a filter would often exclude records that were no longer in use. The idea was that these records were no longer of interest, so they would not be needed for filtering.

It turns out, though, that these records can sometimes be useful as filters. For example, after a service has been decommissioned, any problems that were not yet fixed for this service can be closed out. In such cases, filtering the ‘All Problems’ view by the discontinued service makes it easy to look up all these problems.

Disabled services could already be used as filters, but now the following records can as well:

• Change templates when disabled
• Configuration items when their status is ‘Archived’, ‘To Be Removed’, ‘Lost or Stolen’ or ‘Removed’
• People when disabled
• Products when disabled
• Service instances when discontinued
• Time allocations when disabled

Any inactive record is presented in strikethrough font. This should help people identify these records when they are defining their filters.