The missing responded action – found at last!

Somewhere along the line BMC decided, quite sensibly in my opinion, to add a “Responded” action to the Actions menu on the Incident, Problem and Change forms. The idea being, for those who haven’t seen it, is that you can select this and it populates the Responded Date and Time with the current date and time – essentially a Client-Side Business Rule.

The issue with this action, is how to get it to appear! Recently on one of our contracts the Responded action had disappeared from the menu and was causing some difficulty. I posted a query about this in the MagicSolutions forum (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/magicsolutions/message/63393) and had an interesting couple of responses that suggested I was not alone. I checked on the Magic Knowledge Base (http://magickb.remedy.com) and found nothing useful so did some digging of my own.

It so happens that, nestled in 24.js in C:Program FilesBMCService Desk ExpressApplication Serverscripts is a line of code that looks like:

if(eval(window.MResponded) != null) window.MResponded.parentElement.parentElement.style.display = (document.all("132") == null ? "none" : "");//Shardul. Fix for bug# 36850. Hide the "Responded" menu item if the "Responded Date & Time" field is not available on the form

So, the answer to my issue (and potentially others hence the post) is that for the Responded action to appear in the Actions menu, the Responded Date and Time field must be available (editable or display only) on the form in question! As the default incident forms don’t have this field available, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a number of people who didn’t even know the functionality existed.

Anyway, just thought I would share. As always, comments always welcome.

• responded action
• Service Desk Express