Tailoring best practices

Making changes to a Service Request Catalog tailoring configuration can create problems. The best practice recommendation is to invest in a complete pre-production test cycle to be sure you have all the fields you need and that the names of these fields are meaningful to your user community. It is important to know that when these user fields are available and populated with information by users, if you make post-production changes to a tailoring configuration, there is an impact to existing requests.

If I do this This is the result
Add new fields to an existing configuration. Existing requests will not display those fields when you check their status.
Remove any (or all) custom fields from an existing configuration and add new ones.

Existing requests will not display the data associated with the deleted fields. The new fields will not appear in those requests. The collected data associated with the deleted fields exists in the Service Manager database, but cannot display in the Service Request Catalog user interface.

Best practice: Do not remove a custom field once it is used in a production environment.

Add a new field that is mandatory.

Existing requests will not display this field as long as there is no attempt to edit and resubmit a request.

If the user resubmits the request, the new mandatory field appears and the user must supply any required information or form validation fails.

Best practice: Set a default value for new mandatory fields.