Global lists

The global initer and global lists work together to generate lists for the HPE Service Manager system.

Global lists are stored in the system and are available to any application. Use the global lists tool to add a combo box to a form that displays a list of values, based on a table in your database. For example, set your combo box DisplayList value to $G.time.zones, and the system displays a drop-down list of time zones from the tzfile file.

The global initer builds lists of records from the database. Generally, these lists are used to fill the drop-down lists in combo boxes on display forms. Examples of common lists include a list of all operators in the system, all Incident categories in the system, or all assignment groups on file.

The Startup Lists global list stores all the global lists where the build.startup field equals true. The global list is in the listrepository file. During logon, the system checks the listrepository entry and builds all global lists in this file. If the global list file changes, the Startup Lists global list is marked as expired and rebuilds the next time the lister background process runs. This updates the listrepository record.

Note: Since the lister background process does not run continually, there may be a slight delay between the time a global list changes and when it appears in the listrepository record.

The global initer consists of two parts:

• A server side element which generates and packages lists according to a user-defined schedule.
• A client-side requester which queries lists from the server and places them into client-side memory.