Additional User Picker Help Needed (ARO)

Chris_Keander

We have an Advanced Request Offering which we are getting ready to release, but it came back as rejected from our change board because of the way we currently asking users to pick a user from Active Directory and make that user a related configuration item to the incident.  This is a RO for our internal Property Theft Loss tracking.  We needed a second user-picker for the user that discovered the loss, as it is frequently not the same user that's filling out the form.

I worked with our Microsoft PFE to get this implemented because, honestly, it was a little over my head.  We got it working by doing the following:

User prompt #1 (Required / Text) : "Please start typing the name (First Last) of the user that discovered the loss/damage"
User prompt #2 (Required / Query Results) : "Please highlight the user who discovered the loss from the results list below."

Prompt #2 is configured as such:
Select class:  Active Directory User
Configure criteria:  [Object]Display Name contains 2. Please start typing the name (First Last) of the user that discovered the loss/damage: String
Display columns:  DisplayName string Display Name
Options:  Add user-selected objects to template object as related items

The initial thinking of adding a user this way was because there was a limitation in the default user picker where it wasn't pulling ALL users from AD, so often the user wasn't found in the list.

Is there a better way of adding this functionality to an ARO, because right now this solution is clunky and error-prone.

Tony_Collett

You could expand the number of objects that a Query Result brings in (this will slow down the Request Offering loading times) and use just the Filter without User Prompt 1. 

Otherwise, this solution you provided is one of (if not the best) way to handle searching for a large number of config items with a single Query Result

Tony_Collett

Within Admin Settings Items on the portal, scroll down to "GridviewRecordCap" and increase that number. By default it's 500

Adam_Dzyacky

Portal -> Admin Settings -> scroll all the way to the bottom and hit "Settings Items" on this new page the item you're looking to modify is "GridViewRecordCap"

Tony_Collett

You could expand the number of objects that a Query Result brings in (this will slow down the Request Offering loading times) and use just the Filter without User Prompt 1. 

Otherwise, this solution you provided is one of (if not the best) way to handle searching for a large number of config items with a single Query Result

Adam_Dzyacky

To add on to @Tony_Collett my personal preference for your Prompt #1 has been "type the user's department" and in the query string configuration do a "contains" to let people at least type something vague and start returning values.

Depending on the size of your organization, you could also inflate the size of the result set returned from the default Cireson setting of 500 to something higher. Hopefully goes without saying that making this number super large would probably come at some performance hit to SCSM.

Tony_Collett

I believe the 500 is the optimal size for best performance vs number of available options. You might be able to go to 2000 without taking too much more of a performance impact. but anything above that and you'll want to use a token. 

I don't know about using rhe user department as a token field. My previous job I knew who people were but wasn't sure what department they belonged to. I found that the users display name (which is a concatenation of First Name and Last Name) works alright for query searching. It all depends on what you need though

Adam_Dzyacky

I second all of that - department works when employees know departments, if they don't display name is much more obvious but as Tony said all depends on what you need.

Chris_Keander

We have over 10,500 AD users that this would need to search from.  We opted for now, until a better solution presents itself, to just go with a text field for this information (losing the data integrity and relationalship data, but gaining performance and a more user-friendly UI.)

If I wanted to "expand the number of objects that a Query Result brings in" how would I go about doing this to see how long it would take a query to happen with that many records (or fewer?) 

Tony_Collett

Within Admin Settings Items on the portal, scroll down to "GridviewRecordCap" and increase that number. By default it's 500

Adam_Dzyacky

Portal -> Admin Settings -> scroll all the way to the bottom and hit "Settings Items" on this new page the item you're looking to modify is "GridViewRecordCap"